


Strength

by Canaan



Series: Major Arcana [19]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Alternate Universe, Drama, Introspection, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-11
Updated: 2011-05-05
Packaged: 2017-10-17 22:57:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 28,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/182201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canaan/pseuds/Canaan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rose is going to be executed in the morning.  Where are the Doctor and Jack?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Runner-up fic from the Spring 2010 Support Stacie author auction. Thanks to WMR and the Shadow Proclamation, both for the generous donation and for their patience in giving me the time it took to let the story be what it needed to be. This takes place further down the line than anything else I have written in my Major Arcana series. Special thanks to Yamx and Shengirl, Betas of Awesome.
> 
> Disclaimer: If you recognize it, it belongs to the BBC. Otherwise, it's mine.

  
***** _-1:57 hours_ *****   


_The base's brig is still adrift in the currents and eddies of time, so the women are confined in the tiny barracks once intended for female soldiers. Based on the decor, Rose thinks the 23rd century must've been pretty dull (on top of being a very bad, backsliding moment in the history of the women's movement), at least on whatever colony world these army blokes came from. There are almost forty people crowded into this room meant to sleep eight on bunk beds: mothers, sisters, daughters. They have no idea what's happened to their men, and they know all too well where their children are._

 _And every one of them is looking at her._

 _She pretends not to notice the lens of their attention as she peers into the flat metallic sheet bolted to the barracks wall, combing her fingers through her hair. She doesn't know where her own blokes are, either--she's been expecting them for half the night, and while she's still waiting for a last-minute rescue, she's running low on last minutes._

 _Not like it's the first time, but she's never had quite so much time to_ think _about her impending execution. Or quite so many people watching while she does. The bruise on the side of her head is still darkening under her hair, and it's swelled impressively, though it's not really dangerous. Her pupils are still the same size, which is the important part, and the ache in her head has subsided from blinding to bearable. She notices her own frown in the mirror and tries to smooth it from her face. The baking tray pretending to be a mirror doesn't show her any frown lines, and she hasn't any laugh lines, either. In the middle of a rambling explanation about cell death, the Doctor once told her that the human body keeps growing a bit until it's about twenty-five, and then it starts to die. It's been a long time since Rose knew her "real" age, but she supposes she's more or less there--no wrinkles and no gray hair, but they'll be along any time now. Assuming she lives that long._

 _"How can you be so calm?" Marissa asks. In the silence of the barracks-turned-prison-cell, the whispered words carry._

 _Behind Rose, every Escolian ear strains for her answer. She shrugs and wishes she felt anywhere near as calm as she's trying to look. "Was it the right thing to do?"_

 _A murmur of quiet outrage from the waiting women answers her mild question: every one of them it's here because it was the right thing to do. "Of course!" Marissa says. "But it wasn't your fight--you don't even have a clan, let alone children!"_

 _Rose manages not to flinch, but the words still run icicles down her back._ And now, maybe I never will. _"But it was the right thing to do," she says firmly. "If they kill me, it will still've been the right thing to do."_

 _In the mirror, Rose sees Sallaidh shake her head. "You're very brave, Rose. I hope you're right about your husbands rescuing you."_

 _Rose doesn't swallow against the ache in her throat._ I'm very scared, 's what I am. But the Doctor has to get that thing sealed, no matter how long it takes. Or we're _all_ dead.

All the same, I could really do with that rescue. Any time now.

  
***** _-20:02 hours_ *****   


Rose inhaled deeply as they passed through an open court with food vendors set up along its edges. It did things to her chest that Jack couldn't fail to appreciate, and he grinned. "Peppermint," she decided. "And cinnamon. I could go for a cinnamon bun."

"It's false cinnamon," the Doctor said cheerfully. "Actually the dried leaves of a creeping vine. Not the right climate to grow cinnamon here, but you humans probably can't taste the difference." He ignored Rose as she stuck her tongue out at him. "And I'm sure Escolians make buns out of it."

"Well, that's something, then," she said, mollified.

Jack drew a breath, taking a moment to consider the rich scents of spices. They set his mouth to watering. "I smell cardamom," he said thoughtfully. "Not many places they use cardamom that way, and I haven't had cardamom bread since Jamsa in the 28th century. Nothing's better than fresh, hot cardamom bread, toasted, with just a little bit of butter on top ... "

"Nothing?" Rose asked, grinning.

That just begged for a lewd reply, but before Jack had a chance to answer, the Doctor rolled his eyes. "Humans," he complained affectionately, "always thinking with their stomachs."

Jack couldn't resist. "And here I thought you said I was always thinking with my--"

"Oi!"

"--taste buds," he finished innocently. The Doctor gave him a dirty look. "I think that's a bakeshop over there. C'mon." Jack grinned at Rose and grabbed her hand. She laughed and half-ran with him, dodging pedestrians and the occasional rickshaw as they followed the delectable odors across rough stone pavers. They ended up in front of a shop with displays of tea cakes and biscuits set out on top of its fold-down counter, the Doctor trailing behind them with a put-upon look on his face and the faintest of smiles playing at the corners of his mouth.

The shop itself was built of the same ruddy stone that characterized most of the area. It was cool inside, out of the sun's midday heat, despite the warm, sweet draft wafting out from the back of the building, where the ovens would be. Raised voices spoiled the otherwise enjoyable atmosphere. As his eyes adjusted to the dimmer indoor lighting, Jack noticed the aggressive stance of the women behind the counter. He slowed to a stop, keeping Rose close to him, and heard the Doctor come in behind them.

"I said we don't serve your kind here," a middle-aged woman in an apron told a trio of young men in uniform. "You can go three streets over to Sweetbreads or you can go to hell, for all of me. Just so you get out of our shop." Behind her, a much younger woman--barely out of her teens, if that, Jack guessed--gave the would-be customers a near-murderous glare.

One of a pair of pale-skinned, dark-haired young men (twins, Jack thought, though he couldn't be sure from behind) must have missed the glare. "We're just looking for _phlink_ cakes--Sgt. Reynolds told us you have the best in the city, and they're only available during the Midsummer Festival."

"What's this about?" the Doctor murmured, puzzled in a way that told Jack there was more going on here than a question of _phlink_ cakes.

"You'll get none here," the younger woman said, her voice harsh with suppressed emotion. "Baker has seen too many of you Army men, and had too much grief of you."

The third fellow in the trio, standing at enough of an angle that Jack could see his baby-faced, blond-haired profile, smiled disingenuously at the younger woman. Rose rested her face in her hand, and Jack barely managed not to groan. He'd worn that expression himself too many times not to know what was coming, and the kid wasn't particularly good at it.

The young woman saw it coming, too, and her lips compressed into a thin, bloodless line in anticipation. "Marissa ... " the older woman said warningly.

The swarthy-skinned blond said, "That's a shame. I can't imagine who would want to cause trouble for such a beautiful woman."

Marissa bared her teeth. "You clanless, sister-fucking son-without-a-mother--" she gritted out.

"Happy Midsummer!" the Doctor interjected, advancing on the counter while Jack was still blinking at the TARDIS's translation of what must have been an especially eloquent string of curses. "Lovely festival you have here--five days of gifting and revelry, food, drink, entertainment in the streets--"

"Do you have cinnamon buns?" Rose interrupted.

The older woman gave her a relieved look and fixed a cheerful smile on her face, ignoring the group of young men. "We certainly do. With icing or without?"

"Madame Baker--" one of the twins began.

"Thought you lot didn't have a standing army," the Doctor said as Jack moved around to stand on the young soldiers' other side.

"We don't," Marissa said darkly.

"I think you three have someplace better to be," Jack said in his best officer's voice. The young men straightened and turned to face him as if the same hand had pulled their strings, coming to a recognizable attention stance. "Three streets over? I hear they have cakes there, too."

"Sir!" one of the twins said. All three enlisted men saluted smartly, though the blond looked sullen about it. They turned on their heels and walked out of the shop.

Jack grinned and turned back to his partners, only to discover the Bakers frowning at him. "You're one of them, then?" Madame Baker asked.

 _"We don't serve your kind here,"_ Jack remembered. "Nah," he said. "Haven't been in anybody's armed forces for years ... but _they_ don't know that." He grinned.

Madame Baker did not look reassured. Rose said, "He's ours," and walked over to put an arm around his waist. Jack relaxed a little.

From his other side, the Doctor draped an arm across his shoulders. "Madame Baker, allow me to introduce Captain Jack Harkness and Rose Tyler. And I'm the Doctor. We just came for your lovely Midsummer Festival--didn't expect an army."

The women's tension visibly eased as Jack's partners laid claim to him. "To hear my granddam tell it," Marissa said, "nobody else did, either."

The older woman said, "Call me Sallaidh, please--Madame Baker is my mother. And I apologize for their behavior." She nodded in the direction of the door and the departed would-be customers. "I used to think they at least got better as they get older, but lately, I'm not sure."

"What's happened lately?" Rose asked.

"Why an army, if they're not _your_ army?" the Doctor added, almost on top of her.

Jack shook his head--he could see where this was going. Before anyone could answer his partners, he asked, "Before they get started, do you have cardamom bread? I'd love a couple of slices of buttered cardamom toast."

Marissa and Sallaidh shared a look at Jack's wheedling tone and visibly tried not to giggle. "Oh, go on," Rose said, "he's used to it."

That won them outright laughter. The tension in the bakeshop evaporated as if it had never been. Come to think of it, Jack thought it was the easiest emotional atmosphere he'd felt since they'd arrived for the festival. Which was interesting. Festivals were usually more ... festive. Sallaidh said, "Marissa, toast the cardamom bread, please. And you, Madame Tyler--you wanted cinnamon buns?"

"Rose, please," Rose said as Marissa took a loaf of bread from the shelves behind the counter and began cutting slices. "And yes. For him, too," she said, nodding at the Doctor. "With extra icing." Sallaidh nodded and began putting buns on a plate.

As she opened a large crock, letting steam escape, the Doctor asked, "So why aren't they 'your' army?"

Marissa visibly stiffened as she placed slices of bread on the toasting rack and pulled the lever that started it on its trip through the oven.

Sallaidh said, "Because they're not. They're not from here. They just started appearing." She used a ladle to spoon icing over the plate full of cinnamon buns. "One day, almost a dozen clans were gone, and pieces of the army base were here, instead. Every so often, another bit shows up, with another crop of soldiers that don't know bear lettuce from a hole in the ground."

Jack wondered what bear lettuce was. "Where did they come from?"

Sallaidh shrugged. "I don't know. I might have learned the name of the place back in primary school, but that's been a while."

"A far and distant shore called _Bedda Pentrini_." Marissa's tart words hit his ear oddly, as if the TARDIS couldn't quite translate the place-name in a useful way. "Too bad they don't pack up their base and go back."

 _Sallaidh pushed the plate of cinnamon buns across the counter to Rose and the Doctor. "It's not really their fault they're here, Marissa." Her voice was weary and hollow, as if she'd been repeating those words so long that she'd stopped believing them._

 _"No, but after sixty-some years, it's about time they adjusted," Marissa said. Sallaidh just shook her head._

 _"So where is here?" the Doctor asked. "Where's this army base?"_

 _The Bakers exchanged a look. "You're really not from around here, are you?" Sallaidh said._

 _Based on the technology level he was seeing, Jack wasn't entirely sure how to answer that question. The Doctor said, "Nope. Entirely different planet. Tourists, us."_

 _Marissa shrugged. "I'm almost at the end of my shift. I can show you, if you want. I wasn't headed anyplace special--the baths, maybe, and then home."_

 _The Doctor grinned. "Fantastic," he said._

 __

  
***** _-19:29 hours_ *****   


"In the final days of the fall of the Empire of Turning Leaves, our ancestors sought a ship--any ship--that could take them far away from the mad Emperor-General and the crumbling remains of his bureaucratic armies." Marissa let her voice fall into the familiar, almost sing-song cadence as she led the offworlders up the ancient switchbacks that led to Xhang Li's Drop. "They couldn't find a modern ship, but they found twenty-two very old ships with one last journey in them.

"Those ships drifted long amongst the sea of stars before finding Escolia. Before the landing, the ship-clans signed the Charter of Plowshares. Twenty-two clans vowed that they would never create a standing army. And they bound their daughter-clans to the Charter, and in time, those daughter-clans bound daughter-clans of their own." Marissa trailed off, thinking back to a time she'd never known and a world where Brenna would still be alive.

She shook herself, forcing her thoughts back to the here and now and paying more attention to her footing as they approached the top of the ridge. "Then, in my granddam's time, a star fell from the sky to land in the western quarter. No one knows what crater it might have left, for when it touched the ground, the very world changed around it. Or that's how the granddams and granduncles tell it." She stopped as she came to the crest, letting the offworlders have their chance to come to grips with the landscape before them.

The Doctor exclaimed in some foreign language, but she didn't have to understand it to know it was a curse. Marisa approved of cursing in general, both for the evocative language and the sentiment behind it. She glanced back in time to see Madame Tyler and Captain Harkness running the last few steps to catch up with them. "Oh. That's wrong. That's so ... wrong," Madame Tyler breathed.

Marissa looked down below them, ignoring the sheer cliff that dropped away to their right and trying to look at Xhang Li's Drop as if she'd never seen it before. _As if I were Xhang Li and the star had just fallen, and I didn't know what I'd find when I went to see what had become of my clan-house._

To the west, the cliff ended abruptly, sheared off in jagged red pieces as if some giant had reached out and torn chunks from it. The path continued carefully down through the tortured stone, with steps hewn out of it in places to make it passable. Eighty or more meters below, it emptied out onto a concrete plane as alien to Marissa as she supposed her clan-house would be to the empire her ancestors had fled. The blocky, false-stone buildings of the army base studded the plane, interrupted at random by red-earth buttes like broken teeth in this maw that ate everything she loved. The ruins of a few broken clan-buildings still capped some of them.

Captain Harkness's hand came to rest on his wife's shoulder. "What the hell does something like this?" he asked.

"Identify yourselves," a familiar voice barked.

"What?" Marissa's head snapped around as she looked for the voice, her gaze coming to rest on a spur of rock about five meters away. "Who's back there?"

A moment passed, like the man didn't know how to react to somebody talking back to him. "Identify yourselves," he repeated. She knew that voice ....

"Hello! I'm the Doctor, and these are Rose Tyler, Captain Jack Harkness, and Marissa of Baker," the Doctor said cheerfully, walking toward the voice. "And who are you?"

 _"Antony, behave yourself,"_ Marissa heard in memory. "Gary, is that you?" she asked, elbowing past the Doctor. She went around the spur and came upon her out-cousin, a startled expression on his face and his weapon woefully at half-mast. She'd have to remember to tell Sarah--Gary's wife would be teasing him about this for years.

"Marissa, you're not supposed to come back here," he complained sharply.

She rolled her eyes. "Honestly, Gary. What do you mean with this 'Identify yourself' nonsense? You married Sarah when I was seven!" She heard a smothered snicker behind her as the offworlders caught up with her. "And why are you pointing a gun at me? You wouldn't let Antony do that, not even in play."

Gary looked faintly embarrassed--moreso as the Doctor came up behind her. Well, at least he hadn't lost all sense. "We're supposed to challenge everyone, Marissa. It's nothing personal. It's just ... an Army thing."

"What kind of 'Army thing' means treating the footpath from the neighboring civilian city like it's a hostile border?" the Doctor asked as Captain Harkness and Madame Tyler joined him.

Marissa sighed. "Gary, the people you've just offended are the first offworlders we've seen in my lifetime." Gary winced. "Doctor, Captain Harkness, Madame Tyler, allow me to introduce my out-cousin Gary of Army."

Gary started to stick out his hand in that way the Army men had, realized he was still holding a gun, and gave a proper Escolian bow instead. "Sergeant Gary Jackson," he offered. "Yeah, sorry for the fuss. There's a ... I mean ... Look, it's complicated."

  
***** _-19:25 hours_ *****   


The look on the Doctor's face when Marissa shouldered past him was priceless--Rose wished she'd had a camera--but he'd waded right into the conversation like it hadn't even fazed him. "What's going on down there that's complicated, Sergeant Gary Jackson?" he asked.

Rose elbowed Jack and glanced up to find him grinning, too. Gary said, "It's ... a little hard to explain. I wish you'd picked a better time to visit Escolia." His gaze took in all three of them for a moment before he gave Marissa a worried look. "It's weird down there. General Ortiz and General Walters are ... butting heads. General Ortiz thought it'd be safer for all involved if we just kept a close eye on the traffic between the base and the city."

"In the middle of Festival?" Marissa protested.

"What do two generals on the same side find to butt heads about?" Rose asked.

"You'd be surprised," Jack said dryly.

"That's a 23rd century Terosian military base--" the Doctor said, "or most of one, anyway. What's it doing in the middle of fourth-century Escolia?"

Gary shrugged. "It's not like we had a choice. One minute, everything's perfectly routine. The next minute--or _some_ next minute, anyway--there's only one sun, half the base is missing, and your drinking buddies are twenty-five years older than they were the day before."

" _Some_ next minute?" Rose asked.

"Twenty-five years?" Jack added. "Non-constant temporal flux?"

The Doctor was unusually silent. There was a bleak look on his face. _This is not good,_ Rose thought. She slipped around Jack to stand beside their partner, leaning against the Doctor and letting him wrap his arm around her as Gary said, "The way General Ortiz explains it, we think the whole base was sucked into some kind of a hole in space-time on November 23, 2297. And the other end of the hole emptied out here, all in one place but at different times. So for me, it's been about a dozen years, but for General Ortiz, it's been more like fifty. And the parade grounds came through not quite half a year ago." He shut his mouth abruptly.

"What was on the parade grounds?" Rose asked.

"Not what," Marissa said sourly. " _Who_. General Walters was watching a bunch of stupid young men stand in straight lines and turn on command or something."

"Reviewing the recruits," Gary explained, looking mostly at Jack and the Doctor. "They're settling in now, but it takes time. It's hard to lose everything you know and everyone you loved, all at one go."

"Stands to reason," the Doctor said gruffly. Rose wrapped her arm around his waist to hug him unobtrusively. Jack moved up behind her so he could rest a hand on each of their shoulders. "Any reason we can't go down there and look around a bit?" the Doctor went on.

Gary pulled a face. "You're not catching us at our best."

"The Army has a best?" Marissa asked sweetly.

Gary gave her a tired look. "You know we're not all like that, Marissa," he said. "I may not always like it, but it's home."

Marissa looked away.

Jack said, "We're only here for the Midsummer Festival--we'll take our chances with the timing." Rose could hear the smile in his voice--the one that said, "Trust me, I'm just like you."

Gary sighed. "As long as Marissa's going down with you. I'd hate to have you down there right now without somebody local."

"I'm not going down _there_ ," Marissa protested.

"Please?" Rose asked before one of the blokes could stick his foot in it. "It's really important to the Doctor." Even if she didn't know why just yet. When Marissa still looked rebellious, Rose added, "We can pay you for your time."

The younger woman gave an aggravated little growl. "Consider it a Festival gift," she said. She glared at Gary. "Gary, you owe me for this. If Carina ends up growing up without an aunt, I swear, I'm going to come back and haunt you."

Gary rubbed his forehead with his hand. "It'll be fine, Marissa. I'll call down and let them know you're coming--that's pretty much what I'm here for. _And_ I'll take Carina along with Antony to see the Fifth Day fireworks, okay?"

Marissa nodded reluctantly.

"Thank you," Jack said cheerfully, slipping around Rose's side to take Marissa's hand and bow over it. "We're delighted to have you as our knowledgeable and very lovely guide--"

"Jack," Rose and Doctor said in unison.

Jack released Marissa's hand and straightened up, grinning.

"Ignore him," the Doctor advised, sounding much more like his normal self. "He's just like that. And he's taken."

"Ouch," Jack said. But he was smiling, and when Rose nodded to him, he winked in return.

Marissa wore a small smirk on her lips. "Come on, let's get moving. The sooner we get down there, the sooner we can go back where it's sensible."

"Thanks, Marissa," Gary said. He backed away a couple of steps to a piece of machinery--evidently a communications unit of some kind, as he picked up a handset and began speaking into it.

Marissa led them down the earth-and-stone footpath toward the army base. It was surreal, the way the two landscapes were intertwined. Lucky thing the army base wasn't any lower down, or it would have been awash in the sea. "Doctor," she asked quietly, "what _does_ this kind of thing?"

The Doctor was silent a moment before he said, "Irregular spatial juxtaposition usually results from a radical temporal anomaly with multiple foci and a causal structure at the point of temporal outflow."

Jack stumbled and cursed under his breath. Rose elbowed the Doctor. "In English, this time?" she suggested.

"It's a temporal whirlpool," Jack translated.

Rose felt her stomach drop down toward her knees. "So there's actually something here that's _sucking_ the army base through?"

"That would make sense," Marissa said unconcernedly. "It started when a meteorite landed here."

"Doctor," Jack muttered, "Stanislav's second law says that kind of thing _can't_ be stable. And they're saying it's been around for sixty-some _years_ ... "

The Doctor didn't answer. Rose glanced over her shoulder just in time to see him crumple bonelessly to the ground, sliding unchecked toward the edge of the trail.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks once again to Yamx and Shengirl for awesome beta goodness. Disclaimer: If you recognize it, it belongs to the BBC. Otherwise, it's mine.

  
***** _-01:12 hours_ *****   


_A scraping clatter has Rose turning quickly to the barracks' door. Since the room was never intended to house prisoners, some of the Army men (Rose found she can't think of them as soldiers, not when they no longer have anything to protect but themselves) have rigged a series of heavy bolts on the outside of it to lock them in. Now those bolts are drawing back, and Rose feels her heart begin to race._ Not yet, no, it can't be now, it can't possibly be time, there's got to be more time ...! __

 _The business ends of two guns slipp through the crack in the door before anything else. Marissa steps in front of Rose. "Don't you dare," Rose hisses, grabbing the girl (girl? Marissa is nineteen. When did that begin to seem so young?) by the elbow, trying to wrestle her out of a prime chance of becoming a casualty without actually having to hurt her._

 _"Hey!" a man shouts. "If you don't settle down, you don't get fed." Rose looks past Marissa's dark curls to where three young men have their guns trained on the Escolian women. Behind them a sturdy, somewhat older man with different rank insignia on his uniform holds a tray up in front of him._

 _Marissa makes a small noise of disbelief, turning to look at the Army men. "You're going to feed us before you let us go?"_

 _A familiar voice says, "No. But someone thought the_ moritura _deserved a last meal."_

 _It's amazing how fast the fear drains out of Rose. Private G. Joshi holds the gun farthest to her left, hard eyes looking out at her from beneath his thatch of blond hair. "Joshi," she says, "you don't really want to do this, do you?"_

 _The man with the tray, seemingly content with the reasonable stillness their conversation brings, moves between two of the men with guns and looks around for a place to leave it. Private Joshi says, "Why not? Nothing else has worked. For almost seventy years, nothing else has worked. The Escolians have been holding all the cards, these women and their brothers and their children. General Ortiz kept trying to work with them, to find some way to work with their system that doesn't cut us off at the knees, and you know what? He was wrong."_

 _"It doesn't have to be like that," Sallaidh says, nudging the young woman sitting endmost on a foot locker to move out of the way. She does, and the tray with Rose's last meal takes her place, the Army man who brought it in retreating behind the three with guns._

 _Rose couldn't feel less like eating._

 _Private Joshi continues, "Yes it does. You've made that damn clear. No matter how many men marry into your people, we'll never really belong. We'll always be the outsiders--the only ones on this whole damn planet with no family."_

 _"That's because--" Marissa tries._

 _Private Joshi cuts her off. "It doesn't matter what it's because of! Don't you get it? We're so far from home we can't even find our star in the sky at night. I joined the Army because I was the only son, and that's just what you do. Now it's all I've got: I've got no parents, no sisters, no friends that don't wear this uniform. But you know what? Thanks to General Walters, someday I might have kids--because every time you try to take them away, we'll stop you._ Every _time. Until you finally hurt bad enough to understand that."_

 _Rose can't help shuddering. They're in the wrong, but that doesn't mean she can't understand. If she were that young or that alone, if she didn't have Jack and the Doctor, if she didn't know she can always go home to Mum ... Oh god. What will the Doctor tell Mum, if he doesn't get here in time?_

 _Will he and Jack take her body home?_

 _Rose swallows hard and picks up the breakfast tray, taking it to Míngmèi and her seven-months' belly. "What does the G. stand for?" Rose asks loudly, interrupting the white noise of Marissa and Private Joshi adding to their lengthening series of high-volume arguments. They both go silent, which is a blessed relief--the ache in Rose's head is bad enough without their shouting echoing around inside her skull. She turns her head to see Private Joshi staring at her, blankly. "Private G. Joshi. What does the G. stand for?"_

 _Private Joshi blinks at her like the question's so foreign, he's not quite sure how to answer it. "Gordon," he says eventually._

 _Rose nods. "Thanks, Gordon. For what it's worth ... I'm sorry."_

 _He can't seem to look at her after that._

 _After a moment, the Army man in the middle says, "We're done here. Come on." The gunmen retreat through the open door, bolting it closed again behind them._

  
***** _-19:05 hours_ *****   


"Rassilon's left nut," the Doctor complained, "It's like a hangover without ever being drunk first."

Jack snickered, then went silent. The Doctor suspected there was a look from Rose involved in that, but he was having enough trouble just managing one foot in front of the other while his head pounded like a Langorian tympanus. Jack was taking far more of his weight than he'd ever admit, and when Rose had tried to hold his hand, he'd just about fallen over. She'd wound up walking backwards just in front of him and off to one side, watching him so closely he thought she was checking to see if his pupils were still the same size.

As if a Time Lord's vascular system were so fragile he could get a concussion. Besides, he hadn't even hit his head on the way down ... or at least, he didn't think he had.

"You're lucky that hangover-feeling is the worst of it," Marissa said. "You'd have gone straight into the sea if your leman hadn't got hold of you."

Rose's expression of concern deepened into something hollow-eyed, and she drifted back to his side.

"You may have the bruises to prove it, too," Jack said. "Sorry about that."

"This must be it," Rose said. The Doctor could hear her relief even over the throbbing behind his eyes. "How much does it cost to get inside, Marissa? We'll want to be able to stay until he's feeling well enough to walk."

They drew to a stop before a large, low building. The Doctor forced his eyes to focus as Rose went through his pockets in search of the right currency. He thought those fuzzy blue patches on the side must be the overlapped blue triangles that marked a bathhouse on Escolia.

"You're sure you're all right, Doc?" Jack asked quietly as they waited.

The Doctor grunted and tried to take his own weight again. "Certain definitions of 'all right,' lad. We should be out of range of the oscillating interference pattern now, but I'll feel better for a spell spent out of the sun, waitin' for my brain and my time sense to get on speaking terms again."

"Anyone with a bit of sense gets out of the sun at this time of day, anyway," Marissa pointed out, paying the bathhouse attendant. "It's one of the best times to go to the baths."

"Madame, Uncle, Miss--I really don't think he should go in there," the young man collecting their money said, concerned.

"And why not?" Rose asked. The Doctor wasn't quite sure who "he" was or what exactly they were talking about, but with that note in Rose's voice, the attendant would do well to watch his step.

"Well, he's one of _them_ , isn't he?"

"They're offworlders," Marissa explained.

"And he's _ours_ ," Rose growled. "'m I goin' to have to have this conversation with everyone on the planet?"

"They're her husbands," Marissa put in.

The pieces came together then, and the Doctor slung his arm over Jack's shoulders again and went back to leaning on him, whether he needed to or not. The bathhouse attendant said, "Oh, sorry. Long as you're sure it's safe, Madame."

"I'm sure," Rose said tartly, the echo of Jackie Tyler in her voice.

"Let's just go inside," Marissa said, even as he felt Jack trying to propel him forward again.

The interior of the bathhouse was cool, moist, and pleasantly dim. The Doctor found he could even focus on the benches Jack was guiding him toward. Mostly. A light tension sang through his partner's frame.

A few awkward questions from Rose determined that the communal changing areas were, in her words, "all-persons" and not split up between men and women. Which turned out to be just as well--sitting down was all well and good, but when the Doctor bent to unlace his boots, his head swam and he nearly pitched forward onto the floor. He was really very lucky, he thought, that his partners knew him well enough to ignore him when he complained he was all right, and helped him to get undressed and into the soaking pool anyway.

"I didn't mean to assume," Marissa apologized quietly as they slid into the blessed heat of the soaking pool. "I didn't actually know if it was husbands or lemen; I just thought it was the fastest way to explain."

"Husbands is fine," Jack said, settling both of them onto one of the benches beneath the water.

Rose sat opposite them--still keeping an eye on him, the Doctor thought, amused--and Marissa knelt briefly on the floor of the pool, scrubbing at her short, black hair, before taking a seat on the same bench, a short space away. "What's 'lemen'?" Rose asked when the young woman came up for air. "And why do people keep thinking Jack is a soldier?"

"Hmm? Because he moves like one," Marissa said.

Rose gave her a blank look. She glanced at Jack, instead.

He shrugged and nodded. "If you know what you're looking for, it shows. Military service, law enforcement, a few other things ... "

"You must be from somewhere just as strange as the Army men are from," Marissa, commented, but there was no rancor in the words. "You thought women and men would bathe separately and you don't know what lemen are."

"Oi! Don't you start. These two have been telling me my home's so backwards for years." Rose rolled her eyes, but she was smiling a bit.

Marissa shrugged and grinned. "They might be right," she said.

The Doctor let his eyes close, enjoying the hot water and the slow ebb of pain and nausea. "On Escolia," he explained, "a marriage is a relationship that can result in children. Anything else--a pair of women, a pair of men, or any partnership of people who are too-close kin--is a relationship of love, but not one that will result in children. Instead of husbands and wives, the partners are lemen."

Silence lingered for a moment, broken only by the low murmur of voices, soft sighs, and splashing water. The Doctor slitted his eyes.

Rose was looking back at him. "Feelin' any better?" she asked.

"A bit," the Doctor said. "It's like bein' blinded by a flash or deafened by an explosion--takes a while to stop hurting afterward, and probably longer before your eyes or your ears really recover."

" _What_ happened, Doctor?" Marissa asked. "It looked like you just collapsed."

He let his eyes fall closed again. "Temporal interference," he said, and tried to think how to put that in terms she might understand. "That temporal whirlpool ... Jack's right. It's not stable. It's got ... a shimmy to it, I guess you'd say. Uneven--kind of builds for a while and backs off and then builds again. When it gets bad, the interference spikes."

Rose's toes rubbed up and down along his shin. Marissa said, "But why did that make you faint, and no one else?"

The Doctor supposed he ought to be indignant over the notion of him "fainting," but it was hard to be indignant about anything when he still felt like he'd been swallowed down by a Arkelian dratmot and vomited up again, whole. "Can you sense time?" he asked sharply.

"Funny, usually being all alien and superior puts you in a better mood," Jack said dryly.

"Don't mind him, he's just like that," Rose said. He opened his eyes a bit to make sure she was smiling--which, of course, made him smile weakly in return. She went on, "The Doctor's got some senses we don't. One of them got blinded. Which is bad enough, but ... is it going to keep happening? If this whirlpool isn't stable, just how bad is that?"

The Doctor thought he could feel Jack's eyes on him, even though he couldn't see for sure with Jack right beside him. "Excellent question. Er. Bad."

  
***** _-18:51 hours_ *****   


The kids were such a relief. They were older kids, mostly the ones too big to be bathed with water heated at home, he'd bet. But they were still kids, and they were a little too loud and moved a little too fast, and sometimes they splashed or dunked each other. And not one of them looked at Jack like they expected him to suddenly turn into a murderer or a monster. It'd been a long time since anyone looked at him that way, and it made him uneasy in his own skin.

What the hell was going on with this world? The city was on edge, like everyone from the food sellers to the bathhouse attendants to the men and women taking advantage of the curtained alcoves at the edges of the bathhouse was waiting for something to go wrong--and by the surreptitious looks he was getting, every military man on the planet was at least a little bit suspect.

Jack's nerves were already starting to wear under the not-quite-surveillance. It was almost a relief when Rose asked the obvious question and the Doctor began to hedge. "Bad like twenty years or bad like twenty minutes?" Jack asked.

" _I_ don't know," the Doctor said. "Going to have to get a good reading on the decay rate of the anomaly. Which would be easier if I could get anywhere near it without falling over. Probably the best thing is to go back to the TARDIS, see what I can learn from there, make sure she's safe where she is, then figure out how we're going to get a closer look."

"We're not going to take the TARDIS closer?" Rose asked.

The Doctor shook his head, and immediately looked like he regretted it. "No," he tried instead. "The TARDIS has got some shielding, but bringing anything so directly connected to the Time Vortex any closer to the anomaly could speed the degradation."

Jack winced. He didn't even know the right equations to try and work out that effect.

"Wait a minute," Marissa said, "go back. I don't know what a TARDIS is, but how bad is 'bad'? When this ... whirlpool ... started, we lost a dozen clans and the ground they stood on. And now you're saying that this looks _stable_ compared to what's still coming? What's going to happen to my city?"

 _Oh, this is much bigger than the city,_ Jack thought, but he swallowed back the words, concentrating instead on how Marissa's breasts heaved when she was upset. They were worth looking at, and maybe he was wrong--it wasn't like he could run calculations for the spatio-temporal interactions in his head.

Unlike a certain Time Lord he knew. "Marissa," the Doctor said, "you said that a star fell from the sky, in that story about how the world changed, right?"

She nodded.

"So the whole anomaly's probably tied to that object that fell to Escolia as a meteorite. Now, bad as that sounds, it's a controlled entry with a very definite point of origin, both in space and in time. This far from the point of origin, the oscillation's had time to build, so the degradation won't be quick or clean. And if it hits a resonant frequency ... "

Jack winced.

"What?" Marissa asked sharply as the Doctor trailed off. Rose put a hand on her shoulder, trying to calm her, but Marissa shook it off. "You can't just stop there. What happens?"

The Doctor's eyes shut. Jack stepped on his foot, but it just had less effect barefoot and underwater than it would have otherwise. They opened again, just enough for the Doctor to glare at him as he said, "I don't know. Could be as small as, oh, a couple times the diameter of the city, but if it hits that resonant frequency, half of Escolia could try to turn itself inside out and backwards. Would play merry hob with the orbit of whatever's left."

Marissa made a strangled sound, her eyes gone too wide.

"The Doctor won't let that happen," Rose said quickly. "We just have to get those readings, and then he'll figure out what to do to stop it."

"Then why are we just sitting here?" Marissa demanded.

Jack shrugged. "The world's not really going to end in the next twenty minutes, or we wouldn't have convinced the Doctor to stop and catch his breath." He nudged the Doctor gently. "How are you feeling?" he asked.

He got a noncommittal sound for his trouble. "Better, though not being able to count on my time sense is goin' to take some getting used to. Give me ten, maybe fifteen minutes?"

Marissa swallowed. "Right, I can't sit still that long. I'm going to go wash my hair. And maybe pace. Pacing's what you're meant to do when you need to do something but can't, right? _Don't_ leave without me."

"We won't go anywhere," Rose told her.

"Are you sure, Rose?" Jack asked, letting a smirk touch his lips. "We've got fifteen minutes and those alcoves have futons in them."

She blushed, and he grinned. "I think they'd frown on that, Jack," she said.

Marissa paused in the act of standing and gave Rose another baffled look. "Why? That's what they're there for."

Rose blushed even pinker.

  
***** _-18:22 hours_ *****   


For a city in the middle of its biggest festival, the streets felt anything but festive. Actually, the throng they were wending their way through reminded Rose an awful lot of that business on Elgin III--and look how that turned out. "Is there something special going on today?" she asked.

Marissa frowned distractedly. A man with three small children in tow reached back to grab the eldest's hand and almost walked into her. He mumbled an apology, and she patted the child's shoulder in passing. "It's Second Day, so there's the puppet show--but that draws more children and fewer adults--and _The Gift of Day_ won't be performed for hours, yet."

Rose watched a pair of soldiers outpace her, the space around them clear for at least an arm's length as the unsettled crowd gave them a wide berth. "So this isn't normal?"

Marissa shrugged. "If you could tell me where your lander is, we could probably get there by a back way."

"Oi!" the Doctor shouted as a large pedal rickshaw swerved in from a side street and almost ran them down. "Not my fault there were no good landmarks and most of your roads began as cow paths."

Sober-looking young men and women wearing black tabards over their wide-legged trousers and wide-sleeved shirts kept an anxious watch to all sides of the rickshaw they were standing in. Rose was waiting for Marissa to ask what cows were, but instead, Marissa said, "That can't be good."

"What?" Jack asked tersely. Rose squeezed his hand where it was tense in hers, and after a moment, he squeezed back.

Marissa said, "You don't usually see a whole tattoo of Winter's Children at the same time, let alone in such a hurry. Something's wrong."

"Winter's Children?" Rose asked.

"Police, Rose," the Doctor provided.

"Can we afford to get tangled up in whatever this is?" Jack wondered. "Timing, you know."

"Don't know that we've got a choice," the Doctor said. "It's not like there's a proper map of the city to try and go around whatever trouble we find. We're just going back the way we came."

They followed in the rickshaw's wake, emerging into a broad square Rose thought they'd passed through not too long after leaving the TARDIS. She was sure she could find her way from here ... if it weren't packed full of people milling around, muttering to each other in hushed tones. They were all looking toward a raised dais in the center of the square. Rose could make out rough wooden scaffolding rising from it and a cluster of half a dozen of those police standing to one side.

"Oh!" Marissa breathed, unhappily. "The Council of Grandmothers must have made a decision. I thought it would take longer--an execution during the Festival just seems ill-omened."

"Execution?" Rose hissed.

"Doctor," Jack said quietly, "I think we ought to get out of here. There are too many soldiers in this crowd ... "

Marissa stepped closer to Rose as the crush of people grew more intense. "Corporal Stephanos. Another Army man gone crazy. He tried to take his children from their mother. He was going to kill them if he couldn't have them, but one of their uncles managed to get between him and them. Enough of the clan piled onto the two of them that they got the gun away, but not before the uncle was shot. He died the same night."

Rose shuddered. The Doctor said, "And the Army's okay with Escolians sitting in judgment on one of their own?"

Marissa shrugged. "It's always been the rule that Army law applies on the Army base, and Escolian law applies in the city. The Council of Grandmothers let the Army send men to speak for him, but everyone pretty much agreed he just went crazy." She sounded bitter.

Jack tugged at Rose's hand, and she let her fingers slip from his, turning so she could see Marissa better. "Does that happen a lot? People going crazy?" She could tell Jack was arguing with the Doctor, but they weren't very loud about it, and she couldn't hear much over the background noise in the square.

"Shh," Marissa said, pointing back toward the dais.

An Escolian man--older, judging by his grey hair and the stiffness with which he walked across the platform--stood waiting as a hush fell over the crowd. When it was as silent as that many people could get, he opened a large book and began to read from it. They were too far away to make out the words. "A verdict?" she asked Marissa very quietly.

A piercing whistle interrupted the somber speech, instantly echoed by half a dozen more around the square. The crowd stirred restlessly, everyone talking again as small knots of motion suddenly became apparent in their midst. Groups of black-tabarded police barked orders, forcing spaces between bodies where there wasn't really any space to be had. A trio of them pushed by Rose's right shoulder, one stepping on her foot. She grunted. " _Excuse_ me," she said sharply.

"Rose!" she heard Jack shout from too far away. He wasn't at her shoulder anymore, and she couldn't see the Doctor. She turned to look around for him just in time to see soldiers spring up onto the dais from all sides, rushing the small group of police. Everyone went down in a flurry of limbs, and she couldn't see what was happening over the heads of the people in front of them. "Rose!" Jack called again.

"Rose!" Marissa cried, much nearer. Rose looked her way just in time to see her being elbowed back by more police. She reached out to Rose with one desperate hand, visibly off her balance.

Rose grabbed for her reflexively, hip-checking someone the way Jack had taught her to get in close enough, and wrapped her arms around the other woman to keep them both upright. If they went down in this crowd, they wouldn't be getting up again.

The world went suddenly bright, and an echoing _boom_ rattled along the stone buildings edging the square.

When it faded away, all she could hear was screaming.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta read by Yamx and Shengirl. There will be about a week's delay before the next chapter while I'm out of town--sorry about that, kind of unavoidable.
> 
> Disclaimer: If you recognize it, it belongs to the BBC. Otherwise, it's mine.

***** _-18:11 hours_ *****

Sound traveled slowly. In a way, Rose had known that since she was a kid, but it was one thing to know that thunder came _last_ and another to know that by the time you heard the explosion, most of the danger was past. It was experience that taught that part.

Rose got her arms around Marissa's shoulder's and neck, ducking her head and drawing the two of them down just a bit in case there was any debris following the sound. She'd rather be closer to the ground, in general, but at the moment, debris was a far smaller danger to them than the crowd itself. She could tell Marissa was saying something, but her ears felt stuffed with cotton wool and she couldn't make out what.

And then, as the reality of the explosion set in, the crowd started to move.

There were rules for not getting killed in a mob, and Rose had learned them the hard way. So far, she'd managed to keep them both upright, and she meant for them to stay that way. She grabbed Marissa's wrist as they both straightened up. "This way!" she shouted in Marissa's ear, hoping the other woman could hear her between the temporary ringing from the blast and the rising shrieks of the crowd around them.

The trick to navigating was to move in the same direction as everyone else. Rose steered them gently toward the edge of the sea of people moving out of the square. They washed up against one of the buildings, and Rose pulled Marissa into a shallow doorway niche where they could get a good look at the damage in the central square and not get swept any farther from it.

The wooden dais was gone to pieces all over the square. Where the crowd had already cleared away, there were people left behind on the paving stones, some clutching at injuries and the rest very still. A few black-tabarded police--those who weren't still trying to keep on their feet themselves in the midst of the mob--had begun checking on the fallen.

There was no sign of the Doctor or Jack, and even though she knew that was for the best--if they'd been left behind, it would have been as casualties--it still made her heart do anxious flip-flops in her chest. The Doctor had been doing better, but she worried about him in that crush of people, with his balance still fragile.

Marissa stood wide-eyed beside Rose, watching the river of panicked people flow past. "Are you okay?" Rose asked, but Marissa didn't seem to hear. A tap on the shoulder got her attention. "You okay?" she tried again.

Marissa nodded. "Where are the Doctor and Jack?" she asked loudly enough that Rose could make out the question.

Rose shook her head, wishing she had an answer. She remembered people pushing past her, remembered hearing Jack, already farther away than he should have been. Looking out on the square now, she could see more police arriving, starting to cordon off the square. So much for getting back to the TARDIS. She reached for that sense of Jack at the back of her mind, that little thread that always told her where he was, and knew he was on the opposite side of square. "Probably on their way to the TARDIS," she inferred.

She hoped so, anyway. They'd want to come back and look for her, but with the cordon going up, it was going to take a while, and they needed to get a closer look at that temporal whirlpool as soon as they could. Once they were safely off the streets, Jack could find her biosignature with his wriststrap. It couldn't tell them she wasn't hurt, but it could tell them she was alive and moving, which was usually a good sign.

And speaking of moving .... "We need to get off the streets," she said firmly. Most of the crowd had passed them by now, and the din was beginning to die down. In a couple of minutes, it should be safe to move--but they ought to get to shelter as long as things were still unsettled. People did crazy things when they thought their world was ending, and even though it looked like a small bomb as bombs went, Escolia probably hadn't seen anything like it in centuries--not with that peace charter of theirs.

Marissa shivered and nodded. "No chance of getting to your lander?" she asked without much hope.

Rose shook her head. "Not without going through the square--the Doctor was right, it's too easy to lose our bearings here. We could be two streets over and I'd never know it." She felt for Jack again, and relief washed over her as a special sort of warm rightness told her he was in the TARDIS. He wouldn't have left the Doctor, not with the state the Time Lord had been in earlier, which meant they were both okay ... or at least would be after a trip to the med bay. "Jack and the Doctor are there--the Doctor'll get those readings he wants, and they'll figure out what to do next before they come find us."

"How do you know?" Marissa asked, frowning.

Rose tried to decide how to answer that. _Well, you see, there was an accident a few years ago with a big yellow truck and a dimensionally transcendent spaceship, and ever since then, I know where Jack is. And the Doctor, well, he's just ... predictable about some things._ No, she couldn't see that going over well. "Offworld technology," she said.

Marissa nodded. "I'd better take you back to Baker, then. We'll be safe there until your husbands come looking for you or we can get through the square."

The retreating crowd had left a trail of detritus--objects dropped or just abandoned in the wake of its hasty exodus. Objects, and sometimes people. Rose and Marissa picked their way around the debris, helping people up and tending to small wounds when they could. When they came across an older woman sitting against the side of a building, her eyes wide with shock and her leg bent in a place it shouldn't be, Rose winced. "Hi there. My name's Rose, and this is Marissa of Baker," she said as she knelt.

Her words got the woman to focus. "Don't you have a clan, Madame Rose?" she asked.

Rose smiled. "Rose of Tyler, I think you'd say."

"She's an offworlder, Granddam," Marissa said, standing behind Rose.

The woman blinked and made a slow nod of her head and shoulders that Rose suspected was meant to be a bow. "Well, that's rare indeed on Escolia, Madame Tyler. I am Chì-Huā of Yùn, and I would be very grateful if you or your companion would fetch a Healer. I imagine they're having a busy afternoon, but I'm afraid I'm not going anywhere under my own power."

Rose looked up at Marissa, who was nodding. "You'll stay with her, Rose?"

"Of course," Rose said. "I know it's always easier for me when I'm hurt if someone stays around to distract me." She grinned at Chì-Huā.

Chì-Huā managed a small smile through her pain. "Wonderful. I've always wondered what other worlds are like."

By the time Marissa returned guiding a rickshaw in the tow of a middle-aged man with his dark hair braided back, Rose had talked about London in her time, the beauty of Woman Wept, and the terror of losing Jack in the middle of a counter-coup on Chelzhou. As much as Chì-Huā seemed to be enjoying her descriptions, they were both relieved when the man dropped the rickshaw handles to the ground and smiled a smile to rival Jack's. "Líng-Mǐn of Healer. Bit of a rough day, Granddam?" he asked cheerfully.

"You could say that," Chì-Huā agreed wanly. " Chì-Huā of Yùn. Are the Healers keeping up with it?"

"Will be," he said. "Grandfather Healer's called for everybody to come in. They just haven't all heard the message yet. Miss Baker, would you be kind enough help me get Granddam Yùn into the rickshaw?"

It was an unpleasant process, even with all three of them helping and Chì-Huā's leg tied to the length of notched board that the Healer had brought. She sighed with relief as he lifted the rickshaw's handles again and Marissa and Rose settled her leg into its final position resting on the floorboard. "I hope the day improves for all of us," she said, looking at Rose and Marissa. "You keep an eye on those husbands of yours, Madame Tyler--it sounds like they have a habit of finding trouble."

Rose chuckled in spite of herself. "Funny, they say that about _me_." Marissa bowed to the older woman and Rose waved as the Healer with the rickshaw began to jog away.

"So is Healer a clan or a business? Or both?" Rose asked as Marissa lead them on their way again.

"Mostly a clan, but some of both," Marissa said. "Most Healers either work as Healers or help those who do, but if someone really has a calling for that kind of work, Healer clan usually takes them as an out-cousin."

"And what's an out-cousin?"

"Marissa!" a man shouted from a doorway. "You're not hurt, are you?"

"No, Jacob, we're fine," she called back as they approached him. "Do we have injured?"

Jacob was probably ten years older than Marissa, with the same curling, dark brown hair, though his was tied back in a tail. "A few, but they're minor so far. That only leaves Irena, Dafydd, and Meredith and the twins--plus our Winter's Children--unaccounted for."

Marissa said, "I don't know about Meredith or the little ones, but anyone with any sense was taking children _away_ from the central square."

He stopped them in the doorway. "Were you there at the execution?"

"You mean the riot?" Marissa asked. "We were. Came out of it in one piece, but only because Rose knew exactly what to do. Rose, this is my near-cousin Jacob of Baker. Jacob, meet Rose Tyler from offworld."

Jacob looked startled. "Pleased to meet you, Madame Tyler," he said, managing a bow. Rose nodded in return. "I'm sorry for the short welcome, but since you were there, Grandmother Baker will want to speak with both of you."

***** _-17:34 hours_ *****

Baker clan-house wasn't old enough to have the sharp, machine-cut edges of some of the oldest buildings near the central square, but it was old enough that generations of feet had worn depressions into the treads of its stone stairs. Heavy stone pillars and walls divided the building into a warren of narrow hallways and small rooms. The first storey turned out to be mainly sleeping chambers, to judge by the variety of rolled-up mats and hammocks arrayed around their perimeters.

A final turn at the end of a long hallway running lengthwise through the building brought them into a well-lit room (Rose counted three windows, when most rooms seemed to have only one or sometimes two) furnished with several desks where men and women were immersed in paperwork. Marissa nodded at one of the men. "Good afternoon, Ian. Madame Tyler and I were in the riot. I understand Grandmother Baker wants to see us. Should we wait?"

Ian, a middle-aged man with his long hair drawn up in a queue and reading glasses perched well down on his nose, raised expressive eyebrows. "No, I think they'll want to see you now. Madame Tyler, might I ask your given name so I can announce you properly?" he asked, getting to his feet.

"Rose Tyler," she said. "Rose of Tyler, if you prefer, but I'm from offworld."

Ian didn't bat an eyelid; he just went to the door of an adjoining room, opening it a crack. She suspected he was making eye contact with someone inside. After a moment, he said, "Grandmother Baker, Granddam Seana, Granduncle James--Marissa and Madame Rose Tyler to see you. They were in the riot."

Interesting, Rose thought, that Grandmother Baker was the only one announced by her clan name here in the clan-house. Marissa had mentioned a Council of Grandmothers. Rulers, maybe? Was this a ... what did you call it when a country was governed simply by the old?

One of the women--not as old as the other, and with traces of a red unusual on Escolia in her greying hair--followed her immediate glance at Rose with a dry look aimed at Marissa. "Finally got caught up in one of your own stories, eh?" she asked.

"Yes, Grandmother," Marissa said, sounding much less sure of herself than Rose had yet heard her.

Grandmother Baker put her elbow on the table the three elders sat behind and leaned her chin on her hand. "Bit uncomfortable, isn't it?" she said, in the tone of someone finishing a conversation begun long before.

Marissa hesitated just a moment. The look on her face made Rose think there was only one right answer to that question, even if she didn't want to give it. "Yes, Grandmother."

Grandmother Baker made a noise of acknowledgment. "Right, then. Why don't you tell me about it?"

Rose listened while Marissa told the story: the execution, the escape, the explosion, the fleeing crowd. Rose was able to add a few details--it was amazing how traveling with the Doctor taught you to keep a cool head and notice things even when everyone around you was panicking. When Marissa wound down, Rose asked, "Is this the first time the army's interfered with your law, then?"

Grandmother Baker gave her a sharp and thoughtful look. "Yes, let alone blown something up on their way out. There are records of misunderstandings in the first few years after they began arriving, but they're recorded as definite misunderstandings, not a deliberate choice to ignore a Council decision. Are you a student of law, then, Madame Tyler?"

Rose blinked and smiled. "No, my husbands and I just came for the Midsummer Festival. Doesn't seem to be going too well so far."

"Grandmother," Marissa said, "I'm sorry to interrupt, but you'll want to know this sooner rather than later." Grandmother Baker gestured for her to continue. "You see, one of Rose's husbands is--"

"A scientist," Rose suggested. No sense in making things any more complicated then they had to be.

Marissa seized the provided word gratefully. "Yes. And he wanted to have a look at the Army base ...."

***** _-16:45 hours_ *****

The sun-baked Escolian streets were much emptier than they ought to be in the middle of a major festival, and the people who were moving around were quiet and subdued. Nonetheless, Jack had been stopped on three different occasions--and not just by the local police--with the suggestion that he ought to return to the Army base. The Doctor's arm around his shoulders and a quick explanation had got them back under way each time, but he was damn glad to round the last corner on the aerial image he was using as a map and find Rose's biosignature parked firmly in the building in front of them. "This should be it," he said.

"Clan-house, by the design," the Doctor commented.

They made their way around the building in search of the main entrance. The door stood open, but a pair of decidedly un-festive Escolians flanked it, watching the street with the obvious attitude of guards. The heavy plaque above the door read "Baker."

Jack stayed half a step behind the Doctor as they approached the guards. "Hello," the Doctor said, "I'm the Doctor and this is Captain Jack Harkness. I'm afraid we need to go inside for a moment--we're on Escolia studying that meteorite impact off to your west, and we need to collect somebody before we can go any further. Name of Rose Tyler--blonde hair, pale skin, dressed in offworld clothing ...."

"Our wife," Jack put in, reveling in the warm feeling he got every time he said it. There were so few places, somehow, where they got to use those particular words, and it just didn't get old. "She probably came in with Marissa of Baker, sometime in the last two hours. Mind if we go in and have a look around for her?"

One of the guards grinned. "Oh yes, that one. She and Marissa came in after the riot." Jack couldn't see the Doctor's expression, but he knew _he_ flinched. It was one thing to have been caught up in the fleeing crowd on their way back to the TARDIS--hearing one of the Escolians call it a riot was different, somehow. "They were both okay," the guard added quickly.

His partner stuck her head inside and whistled. "Fiona! Come make yourself useful! The offworlder's husbands are here--help them find her. She's probably with Marissa and Carina." She straightened up again and gestured them inside. "Fiona will help you hunt them down."

They followed Fiona, who was about twelve years old, on a winding path through the interconnected rooms of the clan-house's ground floor, which seemed populated primarily by low tables, cushions, and small children hurdling both. "Marissa! Marissa!" Fiona hollered into the bedlam.

Eventually, she got a response. "Back here--who wants to know?"

"Your friend's husbands."

Fiona led them around the dividing wall into the first in a series of rooms on what Jack thought was probably the back of the building--not that he'd want to put money on it. Rose was sitting in the windowsill with her tongue caught between her teeth in a grin. "Took you long enough," she teased, getting to her feet. "Were you able to get the readings?"

Marissa looked up from where she knelt beside a table, her attention all for their answer even as her hands, obviously on autopilot, changed a nappy. "Nope," the Doctor said. "Not clear enough from where the TARDIS is now, and it'd be too dangerous to move it any closer. Which doesn't mean we can't move _us_ closer." He brandished the portable set he and Jack had put together.

"Not you, you can't," Rose said, eyeing it. "Did that start life as a toaster?"

"I'm going to take it down to the Army base," Jack agreed. "The Doctor'll have to listen in remotely." He grinned and held up his prize. Rose blinked and smirked as she recognized her mobile. "He'll keep your phone; we'll have him on my wriststrap."

The Doctor scowled. Marissa finished wiping a small bum as she said, "Good--I was afraid you might try to go without us. We can leave as soon as I finish with Carina."

"No chance of that," Jack said glumly. "I wouldn't make it out there by myself. I don't know what they're doing to the actual soldiers, but folks in the city sure don't like the idea of _me_ moving around on my own right now."

"Speaking of," Rose said, stepping around the table and pulling him into a half-hug, "how do you suppose we're going to get down there? The Army didn't want us going down earlier, and that was before a group of them set off a bomb in the middle of the city."

"Actually, I have an idea for that," Marissa offered, her eyes all on the pins that she was using as she re-diapered the child. "As long as Gary's still on duty--and he should be, unless the Army's changed how they run their shifts--we should be able to get down there. Once you have those readings, Doctor, what then?"

The Doctor shrugged, pasting a blithe smile on his face--the one that meant things weren't going to be nearly as easy as he was about to make out. "Figure out how best to take the anomaly apart safely. Seal the whirlpool, as it were."

Marissa nodded, pulling the child into a seated position. "Arms out, Carina," she said and began wrestling Carina into a dress. "You're welcome to stay here Doctor, to do your listening." She picked Carina up, holding her on one hip.

The Doctor nodded. "Might as well," he agreed, looking about as happy with staying behind as Jack expected.

A grin tugged at Marissa's lips, and her eyes danced with unexpected merriment. "Here," she said, holding Carina out to the Doctor. "I'll trade you."

***** _-16:12 hours_ *****

"So the _world_ could blow up?" Sarah asked in a quiet, strained voice. Marissa had been trying to find some gentler way to explain it to her near-cousin ever since they left the clan-house, but there wasn't really any way to soften that kind of news.

"But it probably won't," Rose said firmly.

"The Doctor's good at sorting this kind of thing," Captain Harkness added. "We'll just get the readings he needs so he can see what we're dealing with," he said, raising the gadget the Doctor had relinquished to him, "and he'll be able to tell us what we need to do next."

"Oi!" The Doctor's voice sounded flat and distant as it issued from the device on the Captain's wrist. "Don't talk about me like I'm not there!"

"You're not," Marissa pointed out. She could see more Army uniforms than she had expected up ahead. "We're almost at Xhang Li's Drop--and so is half the Army, I think. If you could stay quiet for a little bit, Doctor, I think we're going to have a hard enough time getting down there without explaining why Jack's wrist is talking."

In the silence that followed, Captain Harkness and Rose exchanged a glance and a grin. "Fine," the Doctor agreed gruffly.

It wasn't really half the Army, of course, but there were far too many people up ahead. As they drew closer, Marissa spotted a couple of Winter's Children mixed in with the Army men, which couldn't mean anything good. "We didn't _do_ anything. We were just having lunch! We didn't have anything to do with it!" a man's voice complained.

"We believe you," a Winter's Child said. "If we didn't, we wouldn't be returning you to your base--you'd be sitting in jail."

"Private Joshi, you're not helping," said an older Army man with a greying beard. Marissa didn't know his name, but she knew him by sight, so he probably wasn't one of the newest batch. Good. They could use a voice of reason right now.

A blond Army man--the obnoxious one from the bakeshop this morning--straightened up and turned to address his elder. "Sorry, Sir," he said. "But I don't see how it's our fault that that bunch of old women decided they had the right to _kill_ one of ours."

Beside her, Sarah flinched, and Marissa knew the same stricken look had to be on her own face. "Bunch of old women?" she said, incensed, and shouldered past Rose and her husband to get closer to Joshi.

Sarah caught at her shoulder. "Marissa--"

"Go talk to Gary!" Marissa told her, shrugging her off. "And you, Joshi-of-no-clan, how dare you absolve a man of murder simply because he's part of your Army?"

"You!" Joshi exclaimed. "You're the girl from the bakeshop!"

"Yes, _me_ ," Marissa said. "I have a name, thank you very much--and so does every woman and man on the Council of Grandmothers."

"Like you bothered to learn mine?" Joshi said. "Is that all you people are good for, name-calling and fucking around?"

It was so much like those words from a year before, _"I won't let you bring our daughter up to be another miserable whore!"_ they rang in Marissa's head and quickened her breathing. There were arms around her, but Joshi was another one of them, just a murder waiting to happen, mocking Brenna's blood on the floor ... and this time they couldn't hold her back. She bared her teeth, slipped loose, and flung herself at him.

***** _-15:34 hours_ *****

"So Rose isn't a scientist, too?" Gary's voice asked from Rose's mobile.

"Technically, neither of them are," the Doctor said. On the table, the mobile was on speaker--which would hold for just as long as Carina stayed quietly entertained by young Fiona, after which he was probably going to have to flee the room.

Somewhere down on the Army base, Jack made a rude noise. "Hey, I passed temporal physics with flying colors, and if you think Rose hasn't learned enough to more than pass her A-level in physics since she started traveling with you, I suggest you don't say so anywhere she can hear you." The Doctor didn't dignify that with an answer, and a moment later, Jack said, "I'm showing maybe a kilometer to the center of the disturbance. How close do you want us to be before I start recording?"

The Doctor shrugged, even though they couldn't see it. "Less than five hundred meters. Within thirty meters would be ideal, but only if the ground looks stable--no idea what the area around the point of impact is like after decades of temporal flux."

"So why didn't Rose object when Major Buhari said scientific readings were okay, but the 'wives' didn't need to go?" Gary asked.

There was a pause before Jack answered. The Doctor wondered what the terrain was like--it was utterly aggravating, not to be able to get down there himself! Jack said, "Other than having to keep Marissa in an arm lock until Private Joshi and his friends were well away? Probably for the same reason you agreed to talk Major Buhari into letting me down here."

"It _does_ seem kind of stupid to waste time arguing if Escolia is going to blow up," Gary said. "Is it really that bad? Sarah doesn't usually exaggerate, but it's hard to imagine ...."

"That a force that could fling you lot through thousands of years and across more distance in space than I can conveniently explain could cause geo-gravatic upheaval when it unravels?" the Doctor asked. "It might not be that bad, Gary, but it certainly _could_ be."

"How soon?" a woman asked from the doorway.

The Doctor looked up and recognized Sallaidh, from the bakeshop. "Oh, might not be that bad," he said, grinning reflexively. The last thing he needed was to start a panic here. Bad enough they seemed to have stumbled into the middle of some kind of cultural set-to (and why wasn't there any mention of this Army invasion anywhere in Escolian history? One of the most culturally stable regimes in this galaxy, this was).

Sallaidh looked over where Fiona had the toddler harmlessly entertained. "Doctor, I'm going to explain to you what offworlders don't seem to immediately understand: Just because I've no children of my own body doesn't mean I'm not invested in Baker's future. I loved Marissa's mother. Marissa and Brenna are my daughters, and that's my granddaughter right over there. I'd like to know if there will be a world for her to grow up in. Don't lie to me."

"What was that, Doctor?" Jack's voice came from the phone. "I didn't quite hear."

The Doctor looked away from her, back down to Rose's mobile. "Wasn't me, Jack--Sallaidh just came in." He looked up at her again. "I don't know, Sallaidh, and that's the truth. Jack and Gary are taking some readings right now so we can find out."

She sat across the table from him then, watching the phone and waiting.

After some moments of awkward silence, it was a relief to hear Jack ask, "So Gary, what's Marissa's problem with the Army, other than the obvious? Not that you seem to make anybody around here real happy, but most people don't go after enlisted men with their bare hands and maybe their teeth."

Sallaidh's eyes closed. Gary sounded unhappy when he replied. "About a year ago, her sister's husband showed up, demanding to see his daughter. He and Brenna hadn't been together long when Brenna got pregnant, and she'd broken it off before Carina was even born. He wasn't ... He was never real stable--one of those men that doesn't go into the Army because of a calling or a sense of duty, but because he knows if he doesn't have that kind of structure in his life, he's going to get in trouble."

"He got in trouble," Jack surmised quietly.

"Baker didn't set guards on its doors back then. I was trying to talk him down and Brenna's cousins were trying to keep the two of them apart--if you think Marissa has a temper, you should have seen Brenna's! A couple other out-cousins who married in from the Army were there, and were trying to get around behind him. I think we could've taken him down if we'd had longer. But he had a sidearm. Shot Brenna, shot himself, winged Brian and Sallaidh in the process."

Sallaidh had tears in her eyes. "One of those stupid, senseless things. And I know that, but ... it's easier to blame somebody."

Carina started to cry. The Doctor grabbed for the phone but Sallaidh waved at him to stay as he was and got up, collecting the little girl from Fiona's care and clucking to her as she walked out of the room.

"You still there, Jack?" the Doctor said.

"All set up and calibrating now, Doctor. Just a moment more .... There," Jack said. "It's recording data now. You said it just has to sit and do its thing for a few minutes, right?"

"Yeah," the Doctor said. Rassilon, but he wanted to be there, seeing the measurements as they came in--not sitting here, waiting on recorded data.

"Good," Jack said, "because I'm not sure, but the gradient here makes me _think_ we're on part of the original impact crater. Any reason I shouldn't have a look around for the physical anchor-point of the whirlpool?"

The Doctor thought about it. "Not as long as you're careful of your footing. And whatever you do, don't _touch_ whatever it is. It'd be dangerous enough to anyone else--with your non-fluxing temporal signature, even I can't predict what might happen."

"Right," Jack said cheerfully, "no blowing up the world ahead of schedule. Gary, keep an eye on that, will you? Shout if the numbers get above, oh, seven thousand ΔNTUs."

"This display here?" Gary asked.

"That's the one," Jack agreed.

The silence as Jack searched was agonizing. Not only was the Doctor halfway across the city to avoid the interference pattern, not only did he have to wait on someone else to go looking for the source of the anomaly and count on human eyesight to identify it, but the territory Jack was traversing was the spacetime equivalent of a bog, and he didn't like having one of his partners roaming around it where he couldn't keep an eye on him.

"Hey, Doctor," Jack said eventually, "is there any reason the TARDIS's translation circuit wouldn't translate writing for me?"

The Doctor startled. "Only if something more telepathically powerful were overshadowing it, or if I told her not to. Why?"

"Hang on a second." The Doctor rolled his eyes and waited. Jack went on, "I'm sending you an image of it--hopefully Rose's mobile is clever enough to display it."

The Doctor picked up the phone and fiddled with its limited interface for a moment before giving up and pulling out his screwdriver. A little manipulation with the right tool extracted Jack's image and put it on display on the small screen. The object wasn't anything he could identify--just a broken scrap of something. But the writing ....

The TARDIS wouldn't translate the writing for Jack for the best reason in the universe. The inscription was in Gallifreyan.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta by Yamx and Shengirl. Disclaimer: If you recognize it, it belongs to the BBC. Otherwise, it's mine.

  
***** _-00:53 hours_ *****   


_"What do you think will happen to Gary?" Sarah asks._

 _"I don't know," Marissa says, pacing unhappily in the small space left to them at the end of the barracks. "I don't know enough about how Army law works--and how stupid is that, anyway? I'm the one who collects all the stories, but I never bothered to learn_ theirs _. I can tell you all about what we'd do with the kidnappers if we'd caught them, but I don't have the first idea what the Army will do to one of their own for helping us."_

 _"They remind me a bit of a couple other cultures we've visited," Rose says. That time on Regulus V is at the top of her list, but their unfortunate trip to France in what was supposed to be 2317, but ended up being_ 19 _17, is close behind it. "Armies like that mostly don't appreciate their own side turning against them, especially if they're at war. And supposing what Gordon Joshi said was true, it sounds like General Walters feels like yeah, it's a war."_

 _"Which means?" Sarah prompts._

 _Rose remembers herself and hesitates. She shouldn't have even mentioned it, not with Gary's wife in the room, but the ache in her head makes it a little hard to think, and she's caught the Doctor's habit, sometime over the last few years, of thinking it's always better to know than not to know. "Well, right away, probably nothing--which gives you some time to work on it. There's usually a trial. Maybe the Council of Grandmothers can offer a solution--if he's exiled, he'll be out of their reach and he can come live with you--"_

 _"He can't_ live _with me, he's my_ husband _!" Sarah cuts her off. "What aren't you telling me, Rose?" she demands._

 _Right. Escolian clans find a place for absolutely everyone ... who's born into one. From Sarah's point of view, the Army is Gary's clan. Bringing him into Baker would be incest. "It's better than dying!" Rose says, frustrated. Sarah whimpers, and Rose pushes on, "Armies like this don't always care about right and wrong--only loyalty. Usually, they can execute you if you go against them during a war."_

 _The color leeches from Sarah's face. Marissa stops pacing and drops to her knees beside her near-cousin, hugging her tight. "The Grandmothers won't let that happen," she tells the older woman. "If he's exiled, we can manage ... something. I don't know what, but we'll find a way."_

 _"If the Council of Grandmothers even_ exists _after today," Sarah says dully._

 _"Don't think that way," Sallaidh says. "We govern ourselves. That will be true for as long as there are clans."_

 __Which might only be another generation or so, _Rose worries._ The elders might hold out forever, but the ones Sarah's age, or Marissa's ... sooner or later, they'll give in. They'll give up that sense of self to get their future back. _"The Doctor will have ideas," she adds. "He's good with ideas. If they--" She swallows hard. "If he's not in time for me to do it, Marissa, you and Sallaidh ask him, understand?"_

 _"He'll be in time," Sallaidh says._

 _"Of course," Rose responds automatically. "He just ... makes a habit of dramatic entrances."_

  
***** _-14:27 hours_ *****   


Marissa stopped dead in her tracks. She closed her eyes and then opened them again. She took a cautious step onto the unfamiliar metal flooring inside the offworlders' lander. When she neither walked into the painted wall of an illusion nor woke up, she took two steps backward.

She hadn't believed it when she realized this was the lander, but the Doctor had looked annoyed, and Rose had said "Trust me." Now she walked around it again. It was still less than an arms' span on each side. She stopped in front of the doors and looked in again, watching as the Doctor hooked his equipment into the machine in the center of the room and aimed something that probably wasn't a magic wand at it. Not that Marissa had any better description for the tool. Rose was looking out at her with a reassuring smile. "Offworld technology." Marissa said, bemused.

"You have no idea how far off-world," Captain Harkness replied with a grin she felt all the way down to her toes.

"Jack," the Doctor said sharply. "Stop _flirting_ and give me a hand. Going to need a chronotic phase actuator--I think there's one in Storage Three."

Rose laughed. "Come inside, Marissa, and close the doors. Wouldn't want just anyone wandering in."

Marissa stepped in and swung the doors shut behind her as Captain Harkness asked, "Want me to bring it back here, or should I meet you down in Fabrication?"

Marissa didn't even hear the answer. She worked her way over to Rose, who was leaning back against a railing, and asked, very quietly, " _Down_ in Fabrication? How can it have a down or an up? It's all on one level."

Rose grinned at her. "Same way there can be all these rooms inside in the first place. The Doctor calls it dimensionally-transcendent engineering. Mostly what that means is that his people were able to make things bigger on the inside than the outside--don't ask me how!"

"His people are different than yours, then?" she asked. Extra senses, Rose had said, but ... he _looked_ so human.

"Time Lords," Rose confirmed.

Time Lords. Marissa stared at the Doctor. She knew her mouth was hanging open, but she couldn't seem to do anything about it.

"A chronotic multiphase enhancement array is all well and good," Captain Harkness was saying with his jaw set in a way _she_ certainly wouldn't have wanted to argue with, "but you're never going to be able to get close enough to deploy it without passing out, much less spend the kind of time that invoking selective resonant synchronicity will take ... "

Marissa looked back at Rose. "But they're a myth," she said numbly.

"Mostly," Rose agreed, frowning a little. "Do me a favor--don't ask him about it. There was a war ... Far as he knows, he's the only survivor. It's hard on him."

Marissa swallowed hard and nodded fiercely. If a god or a dragon stepped out of one of her stories and offered to save Escolia, she didn't suppose she'd want to rub salt in his wounds, either. "Right," she said weakly.

The myth in question was rambling on about " ... destructive interference pattern will result in a neutral temporal horizon. Think of it as an abatement field. Takes longer to build than I'd like, but ... "

The words rolled right over Marissa--even the ones she could make out didn't make any sense when you put them together. She glanced at Rose, who was watching her husbands with an indulgent little smile on her lips. "What do you do when they get like this?" Marissa asked.

Rose glanced at her and shrugged. "Wait for one of them to ask me to hand him a spanner. Ask questions. Make tea. Or, right now ... " She grinned. "Fancy a look around the ship while they do this part?"

Marissa's eyes widened and she felt a smile creeping over her face. "You're on."

  
***** _-11:41 hours_ *****   


"For something that's going to save the world, it's not very big," Marissa said thoughtfully.

The Doctor glared, trying not to feel put out with humans and their chronic need for the reassurance of levers and buttons and blinking lights. "It'll let me invoke the resonant synchronicity of the temporally antinomous spatio-temporal matrix anchoring the anomaly. It doesn't have to be as big as a house." He stuffed the chronotic multiphase enhancement array into the backpack Jack offered.

"In other words, it's not the size, it's how you use it," Jack said zipping the backpack shut. Marissa snickered and the Doctor took the backpack before Jack could shoulder it--he'd rather not leave equipment this critical in the care of a man who had a habit of putting himself between his partners and bodily harm.

Rose frowned. "And what's going to protect you from temporal interference spikes while you run it?"

"Temporal equalizer," the Doctor said. "Already in the bag. Jack'll keep that running while I use the other." Rose grinned her approval of the safety measures, and he found himself smiling back in spite of himself. "Right then. Off we go, yeah?" He strode over to the TARDIS's doors.

They opened on pandemonium.

The small square in which the TARDIS sat was a chaos of fallen bodies and burning rickshaws. Moans and wails echoed off the broad stone fronts of clan-houses, and the Doctor could smell gunpowder. _Bad time for a civil war,_ he thought inanely. _Really wretched, actually, since we're a bit busy trying to keep a major spatio-temporal event from shattering the planet._

"What happened?" Rose breathed. "What happened here?"

"They were running after them," Jack muttered, his eyes fixed on the rickshaws. "Why were they running _after_ them?"

"I have to go back to Baker," Marissa said, her voice tight with strain.

The Doctor turned just in time to see Rose reach for her. "Let her go, Rose," he said.

Rose hesitated. "Good luck," she said. Marissa took off at a run. Rose looked up at him. "No time to spare, yeah?" she said unhappily.

"Yeah," the Doctor agreed. "What's the best way to the Army base from here, Jack?"

Jack looked down at his wrist strap, calling up the aerial holograph of the city streets. After studying it a minute, he said, "This way," and led off to the west.

Most of the streets were empty, but any time they got near a clan-house, the wreckage and carnage repeated themselves. The Doctor found himself building a picture as they crossed the city. This was the middle of the Midsummer Festival, and Marissa had mentioned some event happening this evening. The Army had taken advantage of it, taking some kind of action while most everyone was out. He didn't know why, yet, but the businesses appeared untouched, while the clan-houses bled violence and misery.

The first time they had to reroute, it was due to a barricade of smashed market stalls across a major thoroughfare. The second time, a tattoo of Winter's Children had set up a roadblock and weren't letting anyone through. The Doctor started to try and talk them around, but they weren't happy with an offworlder "trying to distract them" and ran the three of them off with clubs and pikes.

Jack kept finding them new routes, but the closer they got to the footpath down toward the Army base, the fewer options there were, and the more they could hear occasional gunfire ahead of them.

They stopped under the eaves of a shop on the western edge of the city. The Doctor glared malevolently at the assortment of large rocks, deceased machinery, and miscellaneous bits and bobs blocking the through road out to the footpath. A small gathering of a dozen or so Escolians on this side of it hurled curses and occasional stones or small bits of debris at the obstruction. When they got too close, gunfire came back, and the Doctor could make out half a dozen bodies in Escolian clothing sprawled on the ground, adding to the obstruction.

"Doctor," Jack said quietly, "unless you think you can talk your way through that, we're going to have to find a different way down there. The terrain didn't look good for rappelling ... "

The Doctor shook his head. With this mood in the air, if anyone spotted them trying to come down the cliffs, they were likely to get shot. "Got a better idea," he offered.

"Oh?" Rose prompted.

He smiled grimly. "Let's go back to Baker."

  
***** _-10:28 hours_ *****   


Baker clan-house was the same pile of old stone it had been earlier in the day, but now it was in the middle of a war zone. Rose had wondered, as they returned, why she didn't see people in the streets with cricket bats or whatever else they could find. Almost no one was out, and those few who were all seemed to be hurrying somewhere. Baker clan-house was no exception to the rule, the streets around it deserted. Its door stood open, and its windows were unshuttered. Rose could see people jammed in shoulder-to-shoulder inside, all looking the same direction.

The Doctor spoke up as they approached the door guards. "I'm sorry, but we need to speak to Baker's elders. Right now."

The two guards stepped in front of the door, blocking their path. "Not right now," the one on the right said. " _Nothing_ is more important than our children, and until the clan has finished discussing that, everything else will have to wait."

The Doctor opened his mouth, but Rose jumped in before he could say anything. "Jacob, right?" she said, hoping she'd identified the man correctly in the twilight. After a moment's hesitation, he nodded, and she went on. "I know you won't believe this, but the Doctor's right; this is more important than anything else. Would you ask someone to get Marissa, and she can explain?" If those police they'd run into on their way toward the Army base were any example, the Escolians might not be inclined to trust any outsiders right now, but they might listen to one of their own.

Jacob hesitated.

"Send someone for her, and while we're waiting, tell us what's happened about the children," Rose said.

He nodded slowly and looked inside, beckoning someone over. An older woman with her arm in a sling appeared briefly, nodding as Jacob spoke to her quietly. When she retreated, he turned back to them. "I don't know how you didn't hear; I thought it was all over the streets. The Army came. They took the children."

Rose stared blankly, waiting for that to make sense. It was Jack who asked, "What--Baker's children?"

Jacob shook his head. "All of them, I think. Every clan we've heard from tells the same story. We were out watching _The Gift of Day_ , most of us. They came with guns. They said they'd come for their children." His voice sounded distant, almost numb with shock. "The ones who were here fought. They took everyone--all of them except some of the oldest, who fought too hard. They killed Natalie and Fiona and Granduncle Duncan. We still don't know if Dafydd ... "

The children. The ones with fathers in the Army--no, all of them, he'd said. "But why take them there?" Rose wondered. "Their parents live here, that's got to be better than having them underfoot on the Army base ... ?"

"No, they _don't_ live here. Not the fathers, anyway," the Doctor said. "Escolian clans don't work like that. Children belong to their mother's clan. Fathers can come visit, and some of them do, but they have responsibilities to their own clans, and their sisters and nieces and nephews." Rose blinked and turned to look at him. He had that look on his face--he was still putting things together, even with the world about to come apart under their feet. "Except the Terosian Army in their time would have hardly any women," he said. "No families there, no children, not for almost seventy years."

"Doctor?" Marissa asked urgently. "Is it done? Are we safe?"

Rose looked back to find her standing in the open doorway, her face haggard. "Carina," Rose breathed, realizing. Marissa flinched. The Army had taken her niece.

"No, we're not," the Doctor said soberly. "Can't get down there past the soldiers. Got a plan, me, but we'll need Escolian help."

Marissa swallowed hard. "Right. Grandmother Baker will want to hear. Come in."

It was almost impossible to move, people were packed in so tightly at the doorways into the central chamber. Marissa led the way through the intently-listening Bakers, finally getting them through a doorway that let them see Grandmother Baker and four others--two women and two men old enough to be considered granddams and granduncles--standing on something in the center of the room so they could be seen over the heads of the rest of their clan. The granduncle Rose recognized from earlier in the day was speaking earnestly to someone off to his left.

The Doctor and Jack stood a bit taller than most of the Escolians, but no one was paying the least bit of attention to their entry. Finally, Marissa stopped, settled her shoulders, and bellowed, "Grandmother Baker! The offworlder scientists need to speak with you. Now."

A shocked silence fell over the room as everyone looked at Marissa and her trio of offworlders. The granduncle who had been speaking frowned at her. "Marissa, this is not the time--"

"Doctor," Grandmother Baker cut him off, "as critical as your project is, it's going to have to wait. Those ancestors-damned Army men have stolen our children, and that means _everything_ else has to wait."

"I wish that were true, Grandmother," the Doctor said, "but this has to come first. If we don't get down to that base so we can seal the temporal anomaly, the world is going to end in about ten hours."


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BR by Yamx and Shengirl. Disclaimer: If you recognize it, it belongs to the BBC. Otherwise, it's mine.

***** _-00:19 hours_ *****

_Rose is a big fan of handcuffs, and not in the same way that Jack is. Handcuffs--from her time period, or any other with similar technology--are easy. A pin, a paperclip, the hook of an earring ... almost anything long and thin will get handcuffs open--and that's if they don't fit the one of the standard keys she's got tucked in the little pouches sewn into the back waistband of most of her jeans._

 _She can pick handcuffs in as little as fifteen seconds--Jack timed her while she practiced, once. She's done it blindfolded; she's done it with her hands behind her back; and yes, she's done it with a head injury before. It's been a useful skill to have, running around with him and the Doctor._

 _By the 23rd century, handcuffs appear to have evolved, even if she's not sure anything else on the Army men's homeworld has. The wrist cuffs she's wearing are are cold-welded shut. She suspects the sonic screwdriver would make short work of them ... if the Army men hadn't taken it when they searched her._

 _Not that it makes much difference at the moment. Even if she could slip them, she's too well-guarded to get away. Six Army men, all of them armed with guns, surround her as she's separated from the Escolian women and led away from them at right angles through the vacant-looking Army base. She isn't sure where everyone else is, but she rather suspects anyone who can hold a gun will be at the execution site, looking menacing as they keep the bulk of the Escolians back. After all, not much deterrent value to an execution if people aren't there watching it._

 _They turn a corner, and for a moment Rose sees the top of wooden scaffolding, just like in the central square yesterday. They're going to hang her. She'd reckoned this lot more for putting her up against a wall and shooting her. Maybe shooting's not visible enough. She's relieved when the back of the Army man in front of her blocks her view._

 _What if the Doctor and Jack really don't make it in time? She can still feel Jack, and he still feels like he's nowhere near here--the same nowhere near here he's been since before they were captured last night._

 _Marissa will tell Jack that he has to go tell her mum. Rose had made her promise. The Doctor won't want to face Jackie Tyler, but Jack has practice telling people their loved ones have died in action._

 _God--will the Doctor and Jack be okay on their own? They were always going to outlive her anyway--she's not stupid; it's not like she's never thought about it. She just always thought they'd have more time together first, the three of them. Plenty of time for them to find some way of relating to each other that didn't involve being such_ blokes _sometimes! If they get into some silly argument, and neither one of them knows how to back down, what will become of them? What if they blame themselves for her death? The Doctor will, she knows--he'll always blame himself for not getting there in time, even though it couldn't be any other way. And Jack ... Jack's human. It doesn't matter how much his head knows they had to seal the temporal whirlpool first, in his heart he'll always blame himself for letting her go, for not dragging her along with them._

 _Worse ... what if they blame_ each other _?_

 _The telltale ache in her throat warns her, and she swallows hard fast enough to keep from sobbing. Chin up, shoulders back, eyes forward. She won't give the Army men the satisfaction of seeing her cry, and she wouldn't want Marissa or Sallaidh or Sarah or Grandmother Baker or anyone else she's come to know on Escolia to feel any worse about her death than they have to._

 _Jack and the Doctor will be fine, she tells herself firmly. Things might be a little rocky, but they'll find another companion. Maybe even someone to love. It would be good, she thinks, if they could find a nice girl--someone level-headed enough to point out when they're being stupid and confident enough to knock their heads together when they're being, well, blokes. Yeah. That would make sure they come out all right._

 _She wishes she'd thought to tell Marissa._

***** _-09:18 hours_ *****

They made a grim procession, Rose thought. It had started with Baker, as everyone who could still walk spilled into the street and began moving--not quickly, but implacably--toward the Army base. Younger Bakers, faster-of-foot than their elders, broke off along the way to take the word to other clan-houses that they were going to get their children back. There was precious little talking, but the sound of footfalls was immense, and it grew as clan after clan left their houses and joined Baker, falling in beside and behind them until all Rose could see in any direction but forward was a sea of determined humanity.

The Army's barricade lay ahead of them now, but there were no Escolians there throwing stones. They would be in the mass of the crowd hiding Rose and the Doctor and Jack, having long since heard the commotion and come to see what everyone was about. Rose bit her lip as they slowed, coming to a halt a bit back from Grandmother Baker and the handful of elders who flanked her. Jack's arm went around Rose's waist, and she pressed closer to him, glad of the simple human contact in the tense atmosphere.

Someone from the Army side of the barricade was challenging them. Probably had been for a while, not that they'd been able to hear it over the march of so many feet. "I am Grandmother Baker, and this is all my remaining clan, and every clan that stands with us." Grandmother Baker's voice quieted any remaining rustle of clothing or shifting from foot to foot as she addressed an enemy she could not see and dared them to silence her. "You have taken our children. We are going down there to to get them back."

From behind the barrier, a mechanically amplified voice said, "Turn around and go home. General Walters is preparing a statement; it will be read in your central square at noon tomorrow. Until then, no one goes past us."

"Young man," Grandmother Baker said, "you misunderstand me. We're going down to speak to your generals. Now. We're unarmed and we're not prepared to harm anyone. But we _will_ go down to your Army base, so you might as well let us through that barrier as make us go over it. Because you can't shoot all of us."

Usually, Rose thought, the Doctor was the one making that kind of speech--the one that left silence echoing in its wake. Grandmother Baker didn't quite have his delivery, but there was absolutely nothing wrong with her results. Her words hung in the air for long, tense moments. The seconds stretched out, and Rose began to worry that the soldiers would call their bluff. Not that it was really a bluff--the Escolians were long past the point of bluffing. But as they approached the minute mark, an unpleasant, grating sound began.

She felt Jack relax minutely before she could see for herself in the thin silver moonlight: a large, central stone scraped slowly back, leaving behind a darkness that was a passageway through the barricade--the same one the Army men must have used when they brought the children through earlier. They were going to be a long time squeezing everyone through that narrow opening, especially with the clans farther east than Baker likely to be coming in behind them for some time. But that would have happened on the footpath, anyway. The plan was to wait until a significant number of them were gathered on the plain below before proceeding to the Army base. With everyone's eyes on the Escolians who had come for their children, no one would be looking at three offworlders with a backpack that was meant to save the world.

They were all three of them too pale to really pass for Escolian, but in the darkness and jammed into the crowd so tightly, the Army men watching on the barricade's opposite side didn't seem to notice. The Doctor had stepped forward a bit while she and Jack had dropped back to separate the two tall man as they made their way down the footpath, but they caught up with him again along the trail--the Bakers in the lead recognized all of them by this point, even by moonlight, and let them pass.

The Doctor had the neutralizer for the interference in his hands, and the quiet glow from its display reassured Rose. "This should be the worst of it," he said quietly. "There'll be no way everyone can crowd in to talk with the Army's leaders, so there'll be large groups around outside, waiting. We'll break off with one of them, get close, and then slip away to the center of the anomaly."

"Actually ... " Rose said. Jack looked at her, and the Doctor made an inquisitive noise, his eyes half on his readouts and half on the trail beneath their feet. "You won't need me, right? You're going to seal that whirlpool, and Jack's going to run the neutralizer?"

"Equalizer," the Doctor corrected absently. "Suppose not. Why?"

Rose looked down the trail in front of her, spotting Marissa mostly by haircut and posture. "I've got an idea. Can I borrow your sonic screwdriver?"

***** _-08:11 hours_ *****

Marissa felt like they spent ages milling around on the plane at the base of Xiang Li's Drop before Grandmother Baker decided enough people had made it down and let them start for the Army headquarters--the closest thing the Army had, Gary once explained to her, to a clan-house. The generals would be there ... or at least, General Walters would. From everything Gary and the other Army out-cousins to Baker had said over the years, she didn't think General Ortiz would ever have allowed this kidnapping, and she feared for his life--as much as she could fear for an elder she'd never met, anyway.

There was a time she would never have believed anyone capable of deliberately harming their clan's Grandfather. It seemed like a very long time ago.

She stayed close to Rose and Sarah as they moved. Rose wanted her to stay with their group, but Marissa had no intention of being left behind. This was a story--or would be, one day, if the clans prevailed. It might be the most important story to happen since the Charter of Plowshares was signed. Not only was Marissa not going to miss a moment of it, she didn't like to think about what might happen if Rose and Sarah went on their own. Stories called for things to go in threes. Three women stood at the feet of the Hanged God. Three women came to see Grandfather Arthur to his grave on Avalon.

Three women would undertake to save Escolia.

As they walked toward the headquarters building, Rose and Sarah allowed themselves to slip farther back than the group of clans, Marissa sticking stubbornly with them. It might have been more obvious, except everyone knew that not everyone would fit into the headquarters building; and the more they spread their presence around the pools of electric light that made up the Army base at night, the better they would hide Jack and the Doctor, out there in the dark. Marissa could see their group forming as they walked, the aunts and near-cousins and some others who had simply been close enough to hear when Rose explained her idea, and would now by no means be kept out.

Army men, mostly unarmed, spilled out of buildings here and there. Some challenged them, but mostly, they just stared. The one or two with guns threatened to shoot, but no one did. Perhaps they didn't want to shoot their wives, their daughters and sons. Or perhaps it was just what Grandmother Baker had said: they could shoot, but they couldn't possibly shoot all the Escolians who had come for their children.

All the same, Marissa had to suppress a shiver each time they walked by a gun. She hated guns. They reminded her of Brenna's blood on the floor, that red flow of life that had slipped through her fingers, no matter how she tried to hold it in. They made her feel small and powerless, and she couldn't stand that.

She was too far back to hear Grandmother Baker challenge the guards at the headquarters building, and she regretted that--if she was going to tell this story someday, she wanted to have every word--but she couldn't be in two places at once. So she might never know what was said, but she watched with satisfaction as the guards finally stepped aside and allowed the Escolians to enter the building.

After a few minutes, when it was obvious that no one else would fit inside, groups began to break away. _Good luck, Doctor,_ Marissa thought. Rose never mentioned her husbands, but Marissa caught her looking, just once. Then she seemed to draw herself up and nodded to Sarah.

Sarah said, "Right. This way."

It only took a few minutes to reach the building where Sarah said Gary lived. It was funny, in all the years she'd known Gary and some of the other Army out-cousins, Marissa had never stopped to think about how they choose to live, or what it must be like to go home to such a small building, with so few cousins and brothers and no sisters or children at all. Rose had them stop well back from the little house--was it a house?--and any other buildings with electric lights, and she and Sarah slipped toward it on their own.

Rose gave Marissa a look when she followed, but she didn't say anything.

Sarah hesitated as she approached the door. Marissa took her hand and said, "For Antony and Carina." Sarah nodded and pushed a single button, sitting lonely beside the door itself.

It was most of a minute before the door opened a crack. "You can't be here right now," a voice Marissa didn't recognize said.

"I need to see Gary," Sarah said, a little tremor in her voice. "Please."

Whoever had opened the door, he obviously knew Sarah on sight. "We can't let anyone in, not even you. The whole base is in lockdown--no Escolians allowed inside, and they're starting to call people in for guard duty, even from the off shifts."

"You don't have to let me in, just tell him I'm here," Sarah begged. "Please. It's about our son. He'll understand." She sounded like she was on the verge of tears.

 _Gary can't have known about the kidnapping,_ Marissa thought. _He's not like this. He was going to take Antony and Carina to see the fireworks ...._

"I really shouldn't ..." the unseen man was saying.

"Gary!" Sarah shouted through the barely-opened door. "Gary, I need you--" A sob broke through, cutting off whatever else she might have said.

The voice from inside shushed her, nervously. "Okay, look, I'll go get him. Just ... wait here."

The door shut, and Sarah sagged on her feet, still sobbing. Marissa hugged her, and Rose took her other hand, murmuring something vague and reassuring.

Not more than two or three minutes passed before the door opened wide, Gary stepping out onto the small poured-stone step where they waited. Marissa let Sarah go, and Sarah managed a small smile for her husband. He wrapped his arms around her and held her close, saying her name.

Sarah spoke quietly into his ear. He nodded, and she began leading him away from the house, back toward their group, Marissa and Rose trailing along behind. "He's okay," Gary said, as soon as they were out of earshot of his house. "I swear, Sarah, I didn't know anything about it, not until there was an announcement and they said anyone who wanted to come make sure their kids were safe was allowed. I've seen him--he's scared, but he's okay."

"I knew you couldn't be involved," Sarah said. "I knew you'd never take Antony away from me--you said you wished you could be with us, but I knew you'd never bring him _here_."

"So you know where the kids are being kept?" Rose asked.

Gary hesitated, and Sarah stopped with him. He looked back at Rose. "Yeah. Why? You can't get them out of there. I don't know what's going to happen, but you can't just take them back with you--they're locked into the basketball courts with guards outside."

"I have a tool that will open anything on this base that's not deadlocked," Rose said. Gary stared. "Let's keep moving," she suggested.

He started to walk again, slowly. "That still leaves the guards. And how are you going to get them home again? There's just the one path up to the city."

"The same way we got Rose and her husbands down here," Marissa said. "No one looks for a single person in the middle of a clan. There are probably close to two thousand of us down here right now, and more still coming. The elders--generals, I mean--will be glad to see the back of us, and every little group that goes will hide a couple of children in the middle, where no one will notice them as long as we stay to the dark areas."

"The hardest part will be keeping them quiet," Sarah said. "We may have to take the littlest ones and the ones who are most upset last. Even if they catch us at the end, they won't hurt the children."

Gary shook his head. "This is a terrible idea," he said as they rejoined the rest of their group.

Several of the nearest glared at him, and Sallaidh said, "They're our children, Gary. Anything we can do, we _have_ to do."

"I know," he said ruefully, his expression lost in the darkness. "That's why I'm helping."

Marissa felt her shoulders sag a little with relief, and from the chorus of faint sighs she heard, she wasn't the only one. "Gary," she asked quietly, "did you see Carina? Is she okay?"

"The oldest kids are taking care of the youngest ones," he replied. "All the babies I could see seemed okay, but the older kids wouldn't let us close enough to look. One of them said we'd have to shoot them first--and by the looks on their faces, they thought we might really do it. God, I felt sick just watching them."

 _Good for them,_ Marissa thought, and tried to tell the upset feeling in her own stomach that she was busy and didn't have time for it.

"I'm sorry, Marissa--I just don't know," Gary said.

***** _-07:44 hours_ *****

The building housing the basketball courts had two sets of doors--the main entrance, and the fire exit off the back. Rose didn't know how the Escolians in her group chose who else they would go to for help, but Sallaidh and three adults about the same age slipped away as soon as Gary and Rose decided they needed a distraction, and five minutes later, all but two of the guards disappeared from the fire exit, going around both sides of the building toward the front. Sallaidh wasn't back, but Rose knew that on its other side, there would be a group of a hundred or more Escolians just near enough the main entrance to make the guards there very nervous, but not close enough to demand action.

Which left her and Gary the pair of guards around back. If it were the Doctor, Rose thought, he probably would have had some clever story for the guards, some way to distract them or win them over without hurting them. She wasn't that clever, but Gary's uniform got them close enough that the guards didn't have to shout to question him.

Rose used setting 3114 on the screwdriver, stuffing it in her pocket and clamping both hands to her ears as Gary did the same. It took the two guards longer to catch on--just long enough that they were wobbling in place before they dropped their guns to clutch at their heads. They fell to the ground, and Rose ended up on one knee herself. She turned the sonic screwdriver off and stayed there, waiting for her inner ears to forgive her.

By the time she stood up, there were several Escolians literally sitting on each guard to keep them both on the ground. They'd been gagged, and Gary had both their guns. Marissa and Sarah were already at the door. "Rose," Marissa said urgently.

Rose nodded and set the screwdriver as she joined them, still weaving a little on her feet. She aimed it at the lock at the junction of the fire doors for a moment, then nodded at Marissa to go ahead.

Sarah looked surprised as the door on the right swung open easily. Marissa held it wide, and the other Escolians began to slip into the brightly-lit building in small groups. They came back out by ones and twos, each with weirdly silent, frightened children attached, and made for the main body of the group, where they disappeared into the mass of people. After a few minutes, small groups of older children--older, yeah, most of them not more than twelve or thirteen years old--began emerging on their own, carrying their infant brothers and sisters and cousins. But only the sleeping ones, she noticed.

Rose leaned back against the closed left-hand door. Beside her, Gary was watching all around for any sign of other Army men come to check on them. So when Sarah emerged with a little boy in tow, he didn't notice until his wife said, "Antony, give your father a hug."

None of them knew how long it would be before Gary and the others like him might see their children again. Antony ran the few steps to his father, and Gary hugged him fiercely. Rose hoped Grandmother Baker--and the rest of the Council, as they arrived--had some luck talking sense into whoever was in control of the Army right now.

"I saw Carina," Sarah said quietly to Marissa. "She's fine, she's just fine. I'd have brought her out, but she's fussing. She'll have to be one of those you take last, after it's really too late for them to stop us."

From behind Rose, a man cleared his throat loudly. She turned to look into the building, horrified, as he said, "Excuse me." Which is why she had one brief glimpse of the rifle butt headed toward her from behind the left-hand door before it struck the side of her head. She flailed wildly, but the ground rushed up to meet her anyway.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BR by Yamx and Shengirl. Disclaimer: If you recognize it, it belongs to the BBC. Otherwise, it's mine.

***** _inside a neutral temporal horizon_ *****

_"How long have we been at this?" Jack asks._

 _"Five hours and eighteen minutes," the Doctor replies, his eyes still on the chronotic multiphase enhancement array's display. "Subjective time. Can't quite say what time's doing on the outside--the whole area's under tremendous spatio-temporal stress. The temporal equalizer's keeping us locked in relation to the anomaly, but there's goin' to be some drift between the inside of the temporal horizon and the outside." He increases the array's wavelength by forty-two hundredths of a_ nylet _. Another tendril of the spatio-temporal matrix quivers, stretches, and then gently lets go of its anchor point. "Shouldn't be much longer now."_

 _His eyes are tired. His fingers are tired. Even his arse is tired--it's been sitting in the same spot this whole time. Jack's got to be as tired as he is, and hungry on top of it; he's got the more boring job, and the Doctor isn't sure when either of his partners last ate. For himself, it was those cinnamon buns ..._

 _He gives his wondering mind a firm shake, focusing on the anchor point. He searches for the next resonance, achieving it through delicate manipulations of the instruments after only 14.23 minutes. More matrix separates. It clings by the frailest of threads now--if it were to suffer an uncontrolled release at this moment, it probably wouldn't take out any more than the Army base._

 _A few more minutes and that last connection slips away._

 _As it disappears, the TARDIS fragment that crashed here and altered an entire timeline finally dies. The Doctor's chest tightens and his hearts ache. He'll never stop grieving for Gallifrey and for his people, but eventually the pain will diminish. Just, at moments like this it's hard to remind himself of that._

 _Jack's arm goes around his shoulders, and the Doctor leans into his lover. "What was it?" Jack asks._

 _The Doctor sighs. "One last bit of the Time War that will never get anyone else killed," he says._

***** _-07:31 hours_ *****

Marissa turned too late, looking away from Sarah just in time to see Rose crumple to the ground. Not that it would have done much good--maybe she could have warned Rose before she got hit, but nothing would have stopped the Army man with the gun from turning to aim it at Antony, still in his father's arms. Gary froze in place.

Beside her, Sarah took half a step toward her son and stopped herself. "Antony," she said, "hold very still." Fear thinned her voice to a thread.

Another Army man stepped out of the building. He spoke into a small box he held up near his mouth even as he watched Sarah and Marissa over the top of his gun. "Bring the others around," he said.

"Others?" Marissa asked. She wanted to check on Rose, but she didn't dare. Not while there was a gun pointed at Antony.

Neither Army man answered her, but a few moments later, she heard footsteps coming around both sides of the building. More Army men appeared, most shuffling awkwardly. The pool of light by the building's back doors began to show her the shorter bodies mixed in with the fully-grown soldiers. Small Escolian faces, eyes wide with fear, looked back at her, and when they were near enough, she could see the guns pointed at the children.

"You motherless in-clan freaks," she breathed, looking back at the man with the box. "How can you _do_ this?"

"They're not my kids."

Marissa stared, vaguely aware that her mouth was hanging open.

The man with the box spoke into it again. "Colonel, how do you want us to proceed?" He appeared to be listening to something, and she spotted a large black protrusion in and wrapping around his left ear. "Yes, sir," he said eventually. He looked past her, out at the gathered Escolians he couldn't see in the darkness ... but who could see him and the children and the gun just fine.

"Here's the way this is going to work," he said, loudly enough to carry to most of their group. "All the children will be returned to this building. If you delay, we'll shoot one child every minute until you begin." Marissa shuddered, the tepid air of the midsummer night gone suddenly clammy on her skin. "I have backup on the way, and if they find any trying to escape with you, we will shoot three children in this building for each child trying to escape."

"You can't do this, Lecomte," Gary said in a low voice, his arms drawn tight around Antony, who looked on with wide, frightened eyes. "It's not right, and you know it."

Lecomte gave him a dark look and said, "Sergeant Jackson, I can't do anything else. We're soldiers-- I think you've forgotten that that means we take orders."

" _Unethical_ orders," Gary said.

"You don't get to make that decision," Lecomte snapped. He looked back at Marissa and Sarah, glaring. "Now, ladies. Get your people moving. I need to see children going back in that door inside of two minutes You know the consequences if they aren't."

In some situations, cursing was entirely inadequate. Marissa ran to do as she was told, like she was ten years old again and one of the grown-ups needed an errand run. By the time she'd finished spreading the message, a steady stream of children were headed back into the basketball courts, and Rose was stirring. The offworlder had made it to a half-seated position, still propping herself on one hand and looking at Lecomte from a decidedly tilted angle. " _Nothing_ makes it right," Rose was saying. "I don't care how you justify it to yourself--you still have to justify it, don't you? You _know_ that this is wrong. You killed people to get this far, so don't try to tell me nobody gets hurt. And what are you going to do to us?"

Lecomte had that listening look on his face again, and he didn't answer right away. Eventually he said, "General Walters has ordered everyone caught with children detained overnight," he said flatly. "In the morning, he'll announce the new order of things regarding the upbringing of children to all the Escolians, and everyone who was caught trying to smuggle children out of our custody tonight will be executed."

Marissa felt her stomach drop to somewhere around her knees, and the exclamations around her blended together into a single horrified voice. Now would be a really good time for a rescue, she thought. At this point in the story, the hero was supposed to show up and make everything right. But this wasn't a story, and they were the rescuers, and they'd failed.

Rose struggled to her feet. "No," she said, far more firmly than Marissa would've guessed she could manage, the way she was swaying. "No, you don't want to do that. You don't want them, you just want me." The sounds of protest faded abruptly as everyone strained to hear. "It was my plan," she went on. "Just one offworlder with the crazy idea that maybe, just maybe, the ones with the guns don't have all the control. Tell your general that. He doesn't want to kill these people; they're your wives, your sons and daughters--you lot will never stand for it. You're trying to make an example, yeah? You don't need everybody. You just need the one troublemaker." She looked very small and very alone. "That's me."

***** _-00:07 hours_ *****

General Walters turns out to be an older Army man, with bushy grey eyebrows and a full head of silvery hair. He's run a bit to fat, but he still looks very proper and put-together in his uniform with all the stars on the shoulders. He doesn't turn as she's escorted up the steps onto the scaffolding's platform and past him. The Army man in front of her tells her to turn and then grabs her arms as she does. As if she'd try to run with all these guns pointed at her.

The gathered body of Escolians is so large she can't see all the way to the edges. She wonders if they're backed up all the way to the footpath down from the city. A long line of Army men keeps them back with guns pointed their direction. They must have been standing there all night.

"I'm sorry we got you into this." Gary's voice is so unexpected, Rose turns before she can stop herself. He's cuffed the same as she is, except they've got his feet hooked together, too.

" _You're_ sorry? It was my idea!"

She catches her breath at a sharp thump, right above her kidney. "No talking!" one of her guards orders. "And eyes forward."

"What you going to do, kill me?" Rose says.

"Doesn't have to be you," he points out.

Her mouth snaps shut on what she wants to say to him, and she looks off the edge of the platform again. She can make out Marissa and Sarah, Sallaidh and Míngmèi and the others she's been imprisoned with right up front. Sarah looks deathly pale, and the helpless look on Marissa's face doesn't suit her. God, what does the Army mean to do with Carina? The little girl hasn't any parents left, only her aunt. Will the Army give her back when they realize, or will she be in an orphanage or something?

General Walters touches a device at his waist. It must be the base unit for a microphone on his collar or somewhere, because his voice begins issuing from the Army base's public address system. "Grandmothers and clans of Escolia, I am General David Walters. Some of you may have known my predecessor, General Jaime Ortiz, who passed away yesterday." A ripple of reaction braces through the crowd. "The policies of General Ortiz and his predecessors in dealing with the people of Escolia have always been aimed at causing as little change as possible within your culture. That ends today."

"By what right?" a woman shouts from just in front of the platform. Rose thinks it might be Sallaidh, but she can't be sure.

"By right of force of arms," General Walters says. "We've tried to deal reasonably with you and had every gesture thrown back in our faces, until you finally decided you had the authority to kill one of our own who only wanted his parental rights." His amplified voice overrides the outcry at that declaration. "No more. Once we're finished here, you are all going to return to your homes. The women who have husbands in the Army will bring their things and come to live with their husbands and children."

Rose can't even make out the individual protests in the roar of denial which meets those words.

The general simply waits until it subsides before going on. "This is not optional--I remind you that we have all your children as hostages for your good behavior. Once the city's families are no longer broken, we will discuss with your grandmothers the other changes we find necessary to achieve a balance with the city-dwellers going forward. And once you begin to implement those changes, then we will begin returning the other children a few at a time. Clans which comply first will get their offspring back soonest."

"You don't really think you can get away with this, do you?" Rose asks in spite of herself.

If General Walters hears her, he gives no indication. "You might think that you can triumph by stealth where you can't win by strength. You are mistaken. Any attempts to fight or to go around these edicts will be met with deadly force. Last night, a group of nearly a hundred Escolians tried to smuggle the children out of our keeping. In the future, this type of behavior will result in the execution of all involved. But as a gesture of goodwill, we have chosen to execute--in a fashion you will recognize--only the ringleader from off-world and the collaborator from within our own ranks who assisted her."

She can't be bothered to worry about Gary in that moment or to watch the reactions of the Escolians she's grown to care about. Her eyes rove over the crowd, looking for tall men with pale skin. She'd give anything, in that moment, to hear a Northern accent or the sizzle of the laser the Doctor's not supposed to know Jack still carries.

Her guards have to nudge her with their weapons before she'll move. She looks around for any avenue of escape--better to risk being shot at this point and hope someone's better nature will spare her than to go along blindly--but they've got her blocked in. She can see Gary trying not to look, and one of Gary's guards glancing at her a bit nervously. _Blond,_ she thinks. _Gordon Joshi?_ But she never gets a clear view.

She's standing in the center of the platform then, trying frantically to bend her thumb around enough that she can slip the handcuffs. It didn't work the whole way to the gallows; it's not like it's suddenly going to work now, but she can't just stand here and do _nothing_. She can feel her heart pounding in her chest, and she wonders vaguely whether heaven really is all harps and angels like Granddad Prentice used to tell her. Doesn't sound too bad, mostly, but she'll miss the Doctor and Jack ...

The weight of the noose is enormous and terrifying on her shoulders. She feels it pulled snug around her neck as the guards step away from in front of her, and there's Marissa looking terrified, and Sallaidh looking away, and Sarah with her eyes so full of tears, but there's no Jack, no Doctor, and this is really going to happen, she's really going to die.

No more last minutes.

***** _-00:01 hours_ *****

The half-light of pre-dawn is invigorating. Jack wasn't expecting it--it was still night while they were working, but the Doctor wasn't kidding about time slippage between the area of the temporal equalizer's influence and the area outside it. The sun should be coming up in the next hour or so, and Jack is looking forward to at least a meal and a bath (and sleep, but he doubts he'll actually get any of that) before the Doctor has them dashing off in aid of some plan to rescue the Escolians' children.

As they pass the sheltering bulk of a large army building, Jack can see a mass of Escolians gathered at the base of the cliff. "That's an awful lot of people to be down here still," Jack says. "I hope that means their negotiations are going well." "An awful lot" is an understatement, actually. There must be thousands of them.

Jack doesn't even have to look at the Doctor; he can hear the frown in his voice. "Too many," the Doctor says. "If things were going well, they'd just send most of them back now that they've made their point. So what do you suppose is keeping them here?" He breaks into a jog.

Jack's just as glad it's not anything faster; he's not sure he could manage much more right now. He picks up his pace, matching the Doctor's steps.

"Damn."

"Damn?" Jack asks, putting on a little more speed. "'Damn' is not what I wanted to hear."

"Something tall at the northwest edge of the crowd. Wasn't there last night--would have been right under a light." After a moment, the Doctor adds, "Looks like scaffolding, like in the central square yesterday. Why would the Army be hanging someone? They're firing squad people."

Like the execution that didn't happen yesterday? "Well, if they're doing it for the Escolians' benefit--" He gestures at the gathered crowd. "Maybe they want to use a familiar method. But I can't imagine they'd have agreed to execute their soldier themselves, not after the trouble they went to to rescue him yesterday."

"Jack," the Doctor says, drawing the syllable out ominously, "check your wristcomp and tell me where Rose's biosignature is."

Adrenaline pours abruptly into Jack's bloodstream, driving him into a dead run along the smooth concrete, thoughts of sleep banished from his mind as he opens his wristcomp and punches buttons. "Blonde?" he asks.

"Blonde." The Doctor paces him. "Damn!" he swears again. Twice in thirty seconds--the Doctor doesn't usually curse twice in two weeks. "I gave Rose my screwdriver."

"This can't be happening," Jack protests as his wristcomp confirms the Doctor's fears. He looks up, and now they're close enough that he can just make out blonde hair and blue jeans as the Army men step away from her. "No!"

The Doctor might be screaming it, too. Jack doesn't notice, because in that moment, she falls.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BR by Yamx and Shengirl. Disclaimer: If you recognize it, it belongs to the BBC. Otherwise, it's mine.

***** _00:00 hours_ *****

Sarah is sobbing next to her, but Marissa's own eyes are dry. The idea of losing Gary is horrible, and Rose was so sure that her husbands would save her, but everything pales in the face of her clan coming apart. Carina ... Carina will grow up only understanding her clan, her Escolian heritage, as a story. This will be the moment, for her, that changed everything. She deserves to hear about it from an aunt who watched it with her own eyes.

Rose and Gary are going to die for Escolian ideals, even though they aren't Escolian. Someone ought to witness it. Someone has to tell the story.

Marissa sees the moment Rose's eyes stop searching and look straight ahead. She watches the offworlder's chin lift defiantly. _"It will still have been the right thing to do,"_ she remembers Rose saying. She'll remember it, and tell Carina when Carina is old enough.

An Army man pulls a lever and the platform beneath Rose's feet falls. Marissa hears screams of protest as the rope measures its full length, draws taut--

Separates, tearing away from itself just below the scaffolding it hangs from.

The tail of the rope disappears through the hole in the dais, and Marissa rushes forward between two guards, not even thinking about their guns. Rose's hands are bound behind her. If that rope is tight, she can't breathe, can't even reach her own throat ....

It's dark under the dais, but enough light falls through the open trap door for Marissa to see as her eyes adjust. Rose lies curled painfully on her side, trying frantically to sit up. Her breath is a strangled wheeze. Marissa jumps over her and kneels, grabbing the hangman's knot in one hand and the loop of the noose in the other and tugging gently till she's sure she's going in the right direction. By the time she's widened the loop enough to pass it over Rose's head, Rose has stopped struggling. "Thanks," the offworlder rasps.

"No one gets that lucky," Marissa says, letting the babble of the crowd and the commotion of feet on the dais above their heads cover her voice, "especially not twice. How do we get you out of here before they decide to try again?" She helps Rose to sit.

Rose immediately tries to get her feet under her and muffles a groan. "We can't. My ankle's broken."

Marissa stares at her. Gary's yelling something about judgments and executioners and there's a heavy, solid thud. She hopes it's not Gary. "Then what do we do?" she asks.

Rose gives her an encouraging grin. She opens her mouth and--

"Out of the way! 's an emergency!" a man shouts, followed by a different voice bellowing "Make a hole!"

Rose's face glows like the sunrise itself, and her grin becomes a broad smile. "Doctor! Jack!" she shouts in reply, her voice still rough from the noose. If it hurts, she doesn't let on; she immediately asks Marissa, "Help me up there?"

Marissa hesitates. "They'll still have guns."

Rose laughs. "Doesn't matter. They're about to meet the Doctor."

As Marissa helps Rose make her slow, limping way toward the edge of the dais, they hear the Doctor grumbling about guns and armies and human stupidity. A moment after that, a pair of tall silhouettes appear in the space between the dais's edge and the Army men trying to keep order in the crowd. "Rose!" the Doctor says, echoed a bare moment later by Captain Harkness.

"Her ankle's broken," Marissa warns as the pair rush toward them.

"Doctor," Rose says as her husbands take her from Marissa's care, wrapping her in careful hugs she can't return with her wrists bound. "We've got to get up there. They're taking the Escolians out of their clans and threatening to kill anyone who tries to stop them. They've got the children as hostages."

Above them, somebody complains loudly, "Well, it's not like they're going anywhere!" Marissa hopes that buys them a couple more minutes.

"What?" the Doctor asks. "Escolian culture is supposed to grow to sixteen worlds, twenty-seven satellites and a fleet of asteroid-mining platforms before eventually joining the Third Great and Bountiful Human Empire."

Jack moves around behind Rose while Marissa stares at the Doctor. "How do you know that?" she asks as Jack aims what she at first thinks is a gun at Rose's wrist bindings.

Everyone ignores her, and the gun spits a laser cutting beam at the connector between Rose's wrists. As soon as it gives way, Rose says, "Help me get up there?"

The Doctor gives himself a little shake. "Right. Jack, you take the left side, I'll take the right."

***** _+00:04 hours_ *****

After years of repetition, Rose has finally got it through the Doctor's lovable but occasionally thick head that she does not appreciate being cradled in his arms like a baby, even though he's strong enough to do it. Not in public, anyway. He and Jack end up with their hands clasped beneath her, and she clings to their shoulders with both hands while they carry her up the stairs chair-style. She can see guns trained on them as her head comes level with the execution platform. "That's a fine way to treat blokes who've just spent all night separating Escolia from your home world and making sure neither one blew up in the process," Rose tells them.

Most of them give each other confused looks. "Blew up? What are you going on about?" General Walters says. He seems surprised as his voice booms out across the Army plane; he thumbs his base unit off belatedly.

"Are we safe?" "Is it done?" A series of questions springs up from the Escolians nearest the platform.

The Doctor and Jack turn so that the three of them face the gathered Escolians and lower her carefully. She puts her weight on her good foot, keeping an arm wrapped around Jack's waist for balance.

The Doctor reaches out to General Walters, yanking the base unit off his belt before the general can do more then grab for him. He turns it back on as he brings the box up to his mouth and says, "Sorted."

A cheer greets the news, and Rose can see heads turning as people begin explaining to their friends and neighbors who never even knew their world was in danger.

The Doctor looks at the general, his eyes narrowing. "I'm the Doctor," he says, still into the microphone box. "This is Captain Jack Harkness. Rose Tyler, you already know, since you lot just tried to kill her. Rose doesn't usually have that effect on people all on her own, and I rather take exception to people tryin' to execute her."

General Walters glares. "I am General Walters, in command of the Terosian Army on Escolia, and we had no choice," he says, and apparently his collar microphone is slaved to the base unit, because he's still going out through the speakers, even with the Doctor holding the box itself.

"There's always a choice," Jack says.

"This world is _wrong_. The women keep everything for themselves. It's time for it to end."

Rose nicks the address box from the Doctor. "No," she says firmly. "Your problem is that you're going to die out because you have no children here. So you want to do that to the Escolians instead? Just ... no. They cut you off and you're desperate--I get that. But it's still wrong. Your way's got people killed, and you haven't even begun to get what you're really looking for yet. So enough of this nonsense! Find another way!"

***** _+00:09 hours_ *****

Rose's words ring in the air, a challenge waiting to be met. Marissa can hear the rustling of clothing and people muttering as they look at their neighbors, everyone waiting for someone else to do something.

No one looks at Marissa. She stopped at the base of the stairs, letting Rose's husbands walk with her into danger, and stayed there while they challenged General Walters. In fact, Marissa might be the only person on this plane whom no one else is looking at just this moment. She could do something fantastically sneaky, if only she had any idea what. She isn't brilliant; she's just Marissa. But _somebody_ has to take action, or they're just going to be back where they started. If not now, then in a year, or ten years, or another generation when people like Private Joshi feel desperate and justified again.

 _Oh._

This won't be sneaky at all, and Grandmother Baker is going to kill her.

Marissa starts up the stairs. General Walters is drawing breath to say something--something very angry, judging by the way his complexion's darkened. The Doctor stands between him and Rose, and Captain Harkness has put both arms around her waist to help her stay upright. "What is _she_ doing up here?" General Walters asks.

Marissa walks up to Rose and looks at the little box in her hand. "All I have to do is talk into that," she asks, "and everyone will hear me?"

Rose nods and passes the box to her. "Move us back a little, Jack?" she asks her husband. "Make sure people can see her."

Marissa holds the box near her mouth as they back away. "I am Marissa of Baker," she says, her voice strange in her own ears as it issues from the same tall poles that General Walters' did. She ignores him, ignores the guns, and walks back toward Gary, who looks somewhat the worse for wear. Private Joshi gives her a distrustful look. She looks back seriously, swallows, and holds her hand out to him. "This is my brother, Gordon."

Gordon's mouth falls open just a little. "You're out of your mind." He stares at her hand.

She holds the box away from her mouth. "What does the Army hold for you, Gordon?" she asks him. "You said you don't have anyone any more. I can give you a family. Aunts and uncles and cousins and a baby niece. Come with me."

"Are you kidding? We'd spend the rest of our lives shouting at each other!" he says.

Beside him, Gary laughs and says, "That's what sisters are for."

"Maybe so," Marissa says, taking Gordon by the wrist and tugging him toward the front of the dais.

He follows along with a dazed look on his face like she's hit him over the head. As they approach the edge, he seems to remember he's holding a gun and sets it on the dais. Even the Army men guarding the clans down below have their heads twisted around, trying to watch over their shoulders without leaving their posts.

"Private Joshi, pick up your weapon," General Walters orders. "This is desertion in the face of the enemy. I can have you shot."

The Doctor says, "General, you really don't want to do that." Marissa doesn't know about the general, but _she_ sure wouldn't want to argue with that tone of voice.

Gordon pulls the rank insignia off his uniform. "They're not the enemy," he says. He looks back at Marissa uncertainly. "Who does this make me?"

She holds the amplifying box up again. "My brother, Gordon of Baker," she says.

***** _+00:13 hours_ *****

_Oh, that's brilliant!_ Marissa's taken the first step; Rose all but holds her breath as she waits for someone else to pick up the banner. She reaches out and takes the Doctor's hand, getting a reassuring squeeze in return.

A commotion down below has her turning her head just in time to see one of the Army men staring off to his side with a peeved expression on his face. Footsteps thump up the wooden stairs at just short of a dead run, and Sarah comes into view. She makes a beeline for Marissa. "Give me the talking box," she says urgently. Marissa puts the address box into her hand, and Sarah marches back to Gary, who shakes his head. Rose can't hear what he says, but Sarah laces her fingers through his and turns back to look at the gathered Escolians, raising the microphone toward her mouth. "This is my husband, Gary, the father of my son. Will any of you take him into your clan?"

The murmuring of thousands of Escolian voices fills the air. Sarah tries to pull Gary forward, and after a moment's indecision, he shuffles along with her, the links of chain binding his ankles clattering as he moves. His guards look at each other as if uncertain what to do in the face of this slow-motion rescue.

General Walters turns to glare at them. "Stop him!" he says. Four men begin to follow the order slowly, as if waking from a dream.

"That's your future you're trying to stop," the Doctor says. "Do you really want to do that?" If it were anyone else, the guards wouldn't even listen, let alone let that simple question dissuade them. But it's the Doctor talking to them, and they hesitate. All the same, Rose imagines it can't buy them much time.

Sarah must feel it too. " _Please_." Her voice is frantic. "They're going to kill him. He tried to help us. Anyone ...."

"Wait!" someone shouts from well back in the Escolian crowd. "We can't get through."

Veins bulge in General Walters' neck, and his eyes are starting to look like they might pop out, unlikely as that is. He yells, "He's an enemy collaborator! A traitor!" The guards give each other nervous looks, caught between an angry superior officer and an unarmed, desperate woman.

"You keep saying enemy," Rose snaps at the general as Escolians draw back in all directions, bumping into their neighbors and squeezing tight to leave an aisle up to the platform. "They're civilians. They're your families--your wives and children and grandchildren. Do they look like the enemy to you?" She points toward the awkward cluster of people working their way up the aisle toward the platform, and the group suddenly becomes clear to her as an improvised sedan chair and its bearers.

"You can't do this," General Walters says, looking at her this time.

The Doctor grins from ear to ear. "How do you expect her to stop it?" he asks. "Not Rose's doing--all the Escolians, this is. All she did was provide them with the right impetus." He glances at her, and the warmth of his gaze brings a blush to her face.

"Blessed undignified," the woman in the sedan chair complains as the two men carrying its rails mount the steps carefully, leaving her at an unusual angle. As they reach the platform and the chair comes upright, Rose notices a plaster cast on the woman's leg and realizes she recognizes her. She searches for one name out of the very many she's learned in the last day. "Chì-Huā," she says.

Chì-Huā of Yùn gives her a pained smile. "I am very pleased at your survival, Madame Tyler," she says. Her bearers bring her chair as close to Sarah and Gary as they can and lower it to the platform. "The Healers will be very angry with me if I stand up, but if that's what I must do to send my voice to everyone, I will."

Tears of relief trickle down over Sarah's smile as she brings the address box to Chì-Huā. "Just talk, Granddam," she says into the microphone, so Chì-Huā can see how it works. Then she passes it over.

"I am Grandmother Yùn." Chì-Huā extends an open hand toward Gary. "This is my son, Gary of Yùn, and I should be obliged if someone would remove these infernal chains from him. Bad enough that one of us can't walk."

Gary hesitates, caught between a new life and the only home he's had for a dozen years. "For Antony," Rose reminds him.

He slowly pulls off his rank insignia. The chevrons fall from his limp fingers to the platform at his feet.

After that, it's as if someone's opened a floodgate. Escolians claim friends and strangers as uncles, brothers, and sons. Jack asks someone in an Army uniform to bring Rose a chair from a nearby building, and the Doctor remembers he has paracetamol in his pockets. Her ankle throbs even so, but not enough that she wants to leave without seeing how this comes out.

Sarah isn't the only one to drag a reluctant husband forward for adoption. The Army men who had the duty of keeping order amongst the Escolian crowd have long since put down their guns. Many of them have become part of the crowd themselves.

And then there's General Walters. After a few more futile attempts at ordering his men to act against both conscience and self-interest, he lapses into furious silence. He's not evil, Rose thinks, not really. He's just ... lost. This is not his world, not yet, and he can never go back. He'd thought he was in control, changing things for the better--or at least the best he knew how. Now all he can do is watch as his familiar milieu slips away from him, leaving nothing in its place.

In the end, he's the only one still standing on the platform wearing his full uniform, betrayed expression on his face. He's damned himself by his own words, and yet Rose can't wish a future alone, rattling around in an empty Army base, on anyone. When a middle-aged woman climbs the steps, claiming the address box and approaching him him purposefully, Rose breathes a sigh of relief. "I was worried no one would take him," she murmurs to Jack.

"They're smarter than that," the Doctor says. "If they left him on the outside, he could still be trouble in the future."

"Yeah, but some emotions are hard to overcome," Jack says. "Trust me on this one--you didn't spent most of yesterday walking around the city feeling like people expected you to go on a killing spree any minute." Rose squeezes his hand and the Doctor puts an arm around his waist.

"General Walters," the woman says, "I am Yuè of Healer. Grandfather Healer sent me to ask if you mean to stay the last Army man, or if you would abandon your rank and become part of a clan."

Rose finds herself waiting anxiously until the general gives Yuè a sour look. "Stay, as the general of an empty base? You've killed my way of life."

Yuè nods. "You were going to kill mine," she says.

His lips thin. "Man was not meant to live alone." Rose's shoulders relax as she hears concession in his voice. He unholsters the pistol at his hip and then bends stiffly to place it at his feet, suddenly nothing but a tired old man.

"What is your given name?" Yuè asks.

He sighs. "David."

She offers her hand. "I don't know if you have a calling, David, but I think you need healing." He takes it, and she turns to face the crowd. "This is David Walters, who henceforth shall be David of Healer, and my uncle."

David of Healer pulls a tiny microphone off his collar. He drops it to the platform's rough surface, a brief snarl of mechanical protest issuing from the public address system as he grinds it under his heel. He follows Yuè down the stairs.

"Don't let him go too far, Doctor," Rose says suddenly.

"Hmm?" the Doctor asks.

She blushes. "They took your screwdriver off me when they searched me. Somebody's still got to tell us where it is."

***** _+02:53 hours_ *****

It's going to take hours to get everyone back up the footpath to the city, but no one questions their right-of-way as they move through the crowd--not with two tall offworlders in foreign clothing and the stretcher Gary and Gordon searched out for transporting Rose. It might have been easier to bring the TARDIS down to the Army plane, now that the whirlpool was gone, but when Marissa suggested it, the Doctor and Jack exchanged a look and refused to let Rose out of their sight for the hour or more it would take.

It makes Rose feel warm inside. She's not really inclined to let them leave her, either. The ankle doesn't hurt much as long as she doesn't move it. The Doctor can sort it when they get back to the TARDIS.

The hardest part of getting home isn't actually the narrow footpath, not with Gary and Gordon to switch off with the Doctor and Jack carrying the stretcher, and not with so many hands to help Marissa carry Carina when she gets heavy. "Wouldn't you rather walk with your clan?" Rose asks Marissa.

Marissa shakes her head. "Actually, I'm avoiding Grandmother Baker. She's probably going to accuse me of starting a revolution."

What makes going home most awkward turns out to be the number of people who want to be close to Rose. Not enough to get in their way, it's just that they want to see her, thank her, or touch her hand. It's ... really weird, and kind of uncomfortable. "I didn't _do_ anything," she complains, "not unless you count almost getting you all killed. _Marissa_ did the hard part."

"I was just in the right place at the right time," Marissa says. "Somebody had to do it, and nobody was pointing a gun at me."

Rose waves that off. "They'll forget all about me as soon as we leave. It's you lot who are going to have to make this work."

"We'll manage," Sarah says, smiling down at her son. She hasn't stopped beaming since Gary was adopted. "Today, I believe we can do anything." She looks up again. "And what about you? Will the three of you be staying through the end of Festival? You'd be more than welcome at Baker, but Marissa says you have plenty of room on your lander. This is Third Day--usually it's dancing and costumes, and I'm sure the feasting tonight will be amazing, we have so much to celebrate ...."

Rose tries not to let her smile go too stiff. She'll be able to dance just fine after her ankle spends an hour or so under the med bay's knitting lamp, but the idea of hanging around all day and into the evening while people keep wanting to touch her and look at her like she's some kind of miracle worker makes her skin crawl. Not that the Doctor ever wants to stick around for these things once he's been involved, anyway.

She cranes her neck to look up at him and finds a deep, serious look awaiting her. She knows what's behind that look, and wonders if she can just ignore it. He says, "Whatever you want, Rose. No reason we can't mend your ankle and stay for a while--the full festival, even."

Rose tilts her head so she can see Jack instead. "Jack, does he look ill to you? I can't tell--he's upside down from here."

Jack smiles at her, but he's carrying it in his eyes, too. "He's fine, Rose. Or as fine as either of us can be after seeing you with a rope around your neck and knowing nothing we could do would be in time."

Rose grimaces. So much for ignoring it. Well, at least they aren't standing around blaming each other ... not that they might not be blaming _themselves_ , but there isn't much she can do about that. "Think I'd rather go, if it's all the same to you. Much as I'd like to see more of the festival, right now I think I could sleep for about a week."

Rose ends up transferred into a rickshaw as soon as they reach the top of the footpath; she has to sit sideways to keep her leg up. That just makes it clearer that people are staring at her. It's a relief when they start to peel off in the directions of their clan houses as they make their way through the city, in search of breakfast or a nap before the celebrating begins in earnest. Gary kisses Sarah and hugs Antony in front of Baker clan house. He says goodbye to the offworlders and follows a young woman from the Yùn clan away through the streets toward his new home.

In the end, Marissa leaves Carina with Sallaidh, and she and Gordon Joshi--Gordon of Baker, Rose corrects herself--are the only ones to walk with them all the way to the TARDIS. "This is goodbye, isn't it?" Marissa asks. "We won't be seeing you again."

Rose shrugs a little, smiling. "I don't think so," she agrees. "Don't think I like being famous."

"I don't think you can get out of it," Gordon says. He still seems bemused, uncertain. He's just had his whole world pulled out from under him for the second time in a couple of years. It might be an improvement, but he's got the right to be a bit confused.

Marissa smiles wide. "I was there. I saw this one with my own eyes. I'm going to be telling the story of how the clans adopted the Army until the day I die. And Carina will tell it after me, or my children someday."

"Thanks," Rose says sourly. "Don't you dare leave out your own part in that. Or the Doctor and Jack--nobody'd be standing here right now if they hadn't sorted that temporal whirlpool."

"At least _somebody_ remembers us," Jack says ruefully.

Rose looks at Gordon. "Don't you dare let her leave herself out, Gordon," she says. "It'll give you two something to keep arguing about."

Gordon laughs in surprise and Marissa rolls her eyes. "I'll do my best," Gordon says.

***** _+04:22 hours_ *****

They're not all right, any of them. The Doctor might be matter-of-fact about getting Rose set up under the knitting lamp, but to Jack's eye, he spends too much time looking at her when he thinks she won't notice. Once her ankle's started knitting, he does a full-body scan and finds an assortment of bruises (including the loop around her throat and on her windpipe, which makes Jack shudder and then try to hide it) and the good-sized goose egg on the side of her head she's been pretending she doesn't have. "What did you do to get that?" Jack asks, trying to keep his tone light.

"Jeopardy-friendly," she responds the same way. The smile on her lips doesn't reach her eyes. "I turned around when some bloke said, 'Excuse me.'"

"That's what manners will get you," he teases. "No wonder the Doctor doesn't have any."

"Oi!" the Doctor says. "Nothing wrong with my manners. Rose, you want to live with a bump on your head for a week, or do you want me to drain that?"

Jack mouths "manners," trying to get a giggle out of Rose. She just looks tired. "I _want_ breakfast," she says. "I was up all night, and it's been a long time since tea yesterday."

"Tea?" the Doctor asks. "How did you make tea and I didn't get any?"

"You didn't even look up when Marissa and I brought it in," Rose says.

Their banter is so almost-normal Jack's not sure if it's comforting or slightly macabre. "Tell you what, sweetheart," he says, "I'll go make breakfast. You get your head seen to."

Jack's not sure if it's breakfast at this point, or dinner, since they're all likely to fall asleep as soon as they've had some food and Rose hurts less. He decides on fried egg sandwiches, which sort of splits the difference, fruit, and tea. Decaffeinated tea. The last thing any of them need right now is stimulants.

By the time he gets back to the med bay with breakfast on a tray, there's no sign of Rose's head injury. Under other circumstances, it would feel like a picnic--it certainly wouldn't be the first time they've picnicked in the med bay, waiting for somebody to heal. As it stands, they're all too tired and eat their sandwiches in a sort of strained silence. Jack waits for the Doctor to say something, anything about Rose's close shave, but he never does.

On their way down the corridor toward the bedroom, the Doctor asks where they want to go tomorrow.

"Escolia's Midsummer Festival," Rose says promptly.

"I thought you didn't want to go back out there," the Doctor says.

She pulls a face. "I don't. But I'd still like to see the Festival, and there's no reason we can't go forward to another one, right? I might like to see how they came out, after adopting a whole other culture."

"No reason why not, I guess," the Doctor says.

Jack opens the bedroom door for them. "That won't be weird for you," he asks, "after they tried to kill you?"

Rose pulls a face as she steps inside. "Not going there," she says. "It was bad enough to live through it the once--if I go on thinking about it, Jack, I'll go mad." She wraps her arms around his waist and leans her head against his chest, just breathing for a moment.

He understands, then, what the Doctor seems to have known all along. She can't acknowledge it, because it would change her. She can't think about it because it might make her act differently, and then she wouldn't be their Rose. He holds her, letting the Doctor shut the door behind them.

She tilts her head back, and for all that there are dark circles under her eyes, the smile on her face is genuine. "And right now, I'd be very happy if the two of you would take me to bed and shag me until I can't think about anything at all," she says.

Jack smiles back at her, and the Doctor bends to kiss the crown of her head. "Your wish is our command," Jack says.

***** _+22:51 hours_ *****

Usually, it's enough to know that things will be okay--they don't typically go forward to see what things might be like farther down the timeline. Jack knows the Doctor doesn't like sticking around after they've cleaned up a mess at all, and they're usually ready to be off on another adventure after they've had a good night's sleep. But at this moment, neither one of them feels like denying Rose much of anything. Any time Jack's thoughts stray, he keeps seeing that helpless moment when he suddenly knew it was her being hanged, just before she fell.

The Doctor makes adjustments at the console, and the engines grind through the materialization sequence. Rose opens the TARDIS's doors onto an Escolia where countergrav shuttles ply the skies above the city, even as pedestrian traffic and the odd rickshaw still make their way along the narrow streets. And the festival is great--fantastic, even. It's the fifth day, this time, and they fill the day with Festival games and food and sweets and enough shopping to make Rose happy. A few hours before full dark, they make their way to the old central square, and Rose spreads a colorful wrap she's bought on the stone pavers to stake their claim to a spot where they'll have a good view of the fireworks.

"They really do come out okay," Rose says, using Jack as a backrest while she chews a skewer of some savory meat sold from a pushcart.

The Doctor makes a noncommittal noise, his nose buried in a colorful tourist brochure about the Escolian Midsummer Festival. "I had no doubts," Jack says, licking the last of the grease and spices off his own fingers. He pulls Rose into his lap and steals a quick squeeze of her breast behind the Doctor's sheltering bulk, just because he can. She squeals and elbows him and promises she'll get him for that later.

He can live with that.

She crawls out of Jack's lap again and gets up on her knees to read over the Doctor's shoulder. "Anything interesting?" she asks.

The Doctor shrugs. "Won't be quite as boring waiting around for the fireworks as I was afraid of," he says. "Seems that Storyteller has the tradition of sending the up-and-coming women and men who practice the clan's traditional profession to tell one tale each to keep us entertained."

" ... Storyteller?" Rose asks. "Is that ... did Marissa start her own _clan_?"

Jack laughs. "She's bossy enough for it."

The Doctor leafs through the brochure and pauses. "Storyteller out of Baker, founders: Marissa and Gordon of Storyteller."

Rose grins, sinking back to sit on the ground again. "Well, good on them," she says. She swallows the last bite of meat off her skewer and makes a contented noise. Jack scoots up behind her so he can hold her in his arms and feel her heart beat.

"Yeah," the Doctor agrees. He turns another page. "And did you know, the third day of the festival is called the Festival of the Blooming Rose?"

Rose's heart speeds up under Jack's hand. "So?" she asks. "Lots of people name things after roses."

The Doctor turns his head to look at them both, his expression inscrutable. "Look at the climate around here, Rose."

She pulls a face. "Been sweating it for two days now, thanks. And?"

"Roses don't grow here."


	8. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BR by Yamx and Shengirl. Disclaimer: If you recognize it, it belongs to the BBC. Otherwise, it's mine.

The Doctor never looks at companions' timelines. There are some things you just shouldn't know about someone you're close to. Too much chance that their timelines intersect with your own in dangerous ways. Too much risk of changing something just by looking. Too much heartsache involved in seeing a tragedy you don't dare avert.

But now, in bed with a book while Rose and Jack sleep (because he still has an unreasoning desire to keep Rose where he can see her, touch her, save her, even though the moment has passed), he thinks about it. The thing with timelines is that they're always there, tempting flickers of possibility at the edges of his time sense--but that's all they are: flickers and flashes, the equivalent of white noise. They don't come into focus unless he tries, and he's always careful not try.

He's going to have to do something--that's always been true, no matter how he's managed not to look at it, not to think about it. He's avoided the issue for a long time, but their trip to Escolia brought it into sharp focus, and he can't any more. Rose might be jeopardy-friendly, but she's also been tremendously lucky. She's cheated death more times than he can count, and she's just had one miraculous escape too many.

A Time Lord is always aware of the passage of time, no matter how he might try to avoid noticing. His beautiful, innocent, nineteen-year-old Rose has grown into herself. She's a woman in her prime and a veteran time traveler, so beloved and so close at hand that sometimes he doesn't really see her from day-to-day, her unlined skin and firm breasts and strong, youthful hand in his.

And Rose Tyler is forty-two years old.


End file.
